The chocolate woman looked at her.
“When can I see my mother?”
The chocolate woman said,” I wouldn’t hold your breath.”
“She isn’t young,” said Susan. Even in this extremity, saying that, she felt disloyal. “I don’t think she’s very well.”
The woman nodded. The nod meant nothing.
At one a.m. Susan asked the time again. And at seventeen minutes past one, when she asked again, the ginger man, the Scottish woman, and another man – fat, with glasses – came in.
Susan got up.
“Let me see my mother, please.”
“I’m sorry,” said the fat man. He sounded sorry, apologetic, not unkind, which seemed unbearably threatening now, or had Susan only watched too many shows on TV?
“At least tell me if she’s all right.”
“Quite all right. Rather distressed, of course.”
Susan suddenly found she was crying. She sat down. The tears ran across her face and stopped. She wondered, removed and bleak, were tears a show of innocence to these people or only of culpable fear?
The fat man came over and pulled out a chair and sat sidelong to her. The ginger man stood. The woman perched on the larger table, across which all dialogue had previously been lobbed.
“This hasn’t been pleasant for you, Miss Wilde. I know that. And I’m sorry to tell you there will be charges brought against Anne Wilde, your mother. Personally, I’m of the opinion she’s merely been incredibly naïve, but at the moment not everyone is happy with that. I suppose rank stupidity could be counted as an offence in a case like this.”
Susan felt void. It was like the last stages of a virus. She didn’t care anymore. She said, mechanically, “Will the child be all right?” Because in the distant future she might sometime want to know.
“Perhaps.”
“I thought –”
“Oh, we’ve got the child away from them. There won’t be any more of that for her. But I’m sure you’re aware, in these situations, certain things will already have happened. She’ll be damaged. They always are. But, she’s young. As you are, Miss Wilde. We heal better when we’re young.”
Beyond the room, a bell rang, once, twice. It sounded almost like a fire drill, but no one took any notice.
“There’s just one other matter I need to mention, Miss Wilde.” He waited, as if for her to say brightly, Oh, what? Then he said, “Your friend at the flats, Crissie Fielding –”
Susan thought, Who is Crissie Fielding? She thought, But they will have watched me, too, they know everything. They probably know what I have for breakfast. They probably know my whole life story. They know I have a neighbour who is unhinged, and called Crissie.
“What about her?”
“It seems she has some influential admirers, Miss Wilde. We wondered a little, you see. But she isn’t someone who would need to be involved in this sort of dirty little game.”
“You thought Crissie –”
“No, we didn’t think anything, Miss Wilde. Nor do we think it about you, you’ll be relieved to learn. And now that’s sorted out,” (what had been?) “maybe we should get you home.”
Susan started to say, in her viral voice of halting cotton wool, “You must let me see Anne first –”
But nobody took any notice.
The fat man went out, smiling and affable, his work, whatever it was, well done. Susan had to sign a couple of papers. They took her down to another room and gave her back her watch and the things from her handbag.
Then she had to sit and wait, and now she didn’t know why. Unless it was all a ruse, and they weren’t going to let her go.
In this room, which was bigger, with pale, grey-washed walls and more-padded chairs, and an unoccupied desk, there was also a clock.
The clock and Susan’s watch showed almost an hour’s difference. Obviously it would be her watch which had gone wrong, slowing down in captivity as she had.
And she thought of Anne somewhere in the building, (as if she had only just realised this) her own watch useless, and should Susan have made more fuss? But no, it would accomplish nothing.
She thought, What do I have to do? Do I have to get her a lawyer? Maybe Mike Hammond, or Laurel, could advise her. She would have to talk to someone. It was all such a business. She remembered Anne saying, soft and sombre, “Oh, God, now we’ve got all this death business, forms, mess, and the bloody funeral.” After the police found Catherine sitting dead on a park bench, twenty years ago.
It was five a.m., or four-ten. Someone came in, a man. “Come along, Miss Wilde.”
She followed him, and they went through a lot of fiercely lit corridors, and at the windows, which any new room they passed had, the black sky seemed never likely to give way.
She fell asleep in the car, as Anne had, during the drive back into London. The driver woke her in a side street. Here she had to leave the big car and get into a cab. She was cold. She thought confusedly the cab driver would start to talk: Where have you been? Where are you going this time of the morning? He never spoke.
She wondered if she had enough money on her to pay him. This grew frighteningly important. She started to elaborate mental plans of how she must explain, leave him what cash she had, rush into her flat and bring the rest out. In the end, he pulled up in Dunkirk Street, where now the trees were large and fine and covered with the spearheads of buds. It was so cold. Something like white sugar coated the gutters, the roofs, the limbs of boughs. She got out, but the cab drove off before she could begin the rigmarole about money.
In the early morning, with the milk-floats going by, under the thinning sky, where light had broken through the blackness after all, in the smell of the cold. Walking.
Why hadn’t the cab brought her to Tower Road?
