Six

Detective Chief Inspector Robert Wilde sat with his back to the door, watching the street outside his office. He had opened the windows, and the sound of the traffic streamed in along with the midday sun.

The day had become unusually hot, and humidity was high. He had peeled off his jacket after coming back from Aubrete Manor, but still his shirt was sticky, and the scent of some plant clung to him, as insidious as prying fingers. He thought of Laura Aubrete, standing over her husband with that faintly supercilious expression belied by her smile, a pair of secateurs in one hand, the dead rose heads in the other.

As he had driven away, he had stopped before he got out of the grounds, and looked back down the long drive. Paths swept away to left and right, dipping below the trees; the parasol-shaped roof of the café hung like another exotic petal above the greenery.

He sat thinking of Anna Miles’ drive, the difference between the two houses—the cottage track with its potholed and rutted surface, the grass beginning to grow in the centre, two deep wheel ridges on either side, and bordered by a barbed wire fence until the pasture stopped at a scrubby and windswept garden. There was no comparison at all between the two. Even in the dark, even in rain, even to a stranger, it was impossible that anyone would think that Anna Miles’ drive was the drive to the Manor. No signposts, for a start. No glossy gold-on-green boards by the gates. No chestnut trees. No lake. It was the wrong house …

It made no sense. But then, nothing at all made sense about this case.

He considered Anna Miles, a woman he had never met until that morning: the slight and defensive stance as she leaned on the fence. A face of absolute weariness. A pair of piercing and very pale eyes. Long-fingered hands, the hands of an artist.

He thought of her room upstairs in the cottage, of the chest of drawers that they had found pulled almost across the door, as if for defence. And Matthew Aubrete’s phrase. She just appeared … in a manner of speaking.

She just appeared. Like the girl in their custody room downstairs now. The girl in the car with Alisha Graham.

She just appeared …

He put his hand on the intercom to the main office.

‘Is Sandys there?’

‘No sir … he’s gone down to Comms to get the stuff from Manningham.’

‘Tell him to come in to me when he arrives.’

Wilde stood up, easing the fabric of his shirt away from his back. From this window, he could see the whole length of the town’s main street. It was packed with shoppers, a moving stream of bodies. Suddenly, he saw what he had been waiting for—Alice, coming up Cornhill, running, her blue holdall slung across one shoulder.

He hoped that his daughter would glance up to the second-floor window, and see him. He raised his hand to indicate that she should stop at the kerb, watch the traffic, be careful. Then, almost as soon as he had raised his palm, he dropped it. It would only earn him another lecture, he realized, with a slight smile. A lecture about her being fourteen and perfectly able to cross the road alone.

Able to do almost everything alone, he thought.

Or so his daughter was absolutely convinced.

Alice came to the edge of the pavement, saw a break in the cars, and jogged across. He watched her at the oblique angle afforded by his elevated view: her very square shoulder under a blue sweat top, the shoulder of a tennis player. A narrow waist, narrow hips, long legs with no shape at all, straight as dyes. Hair pulled back in a severe ponytail. She had grown out the fringe only last year, much to his disappointment.

‘Dad, no one has a fringe. Only babies.’

That was it, he supposed. The last little fragment of her dependent childhood, the thick, straight-cut blonde fringe, going the way of all other things. The sticky grasp of a small hand in his own. The My Little Ponies. The pink plastic lunchboxes. Alice was stranded now somewhere in the strange landscape of adolescence, sometimes wanting him, sometimes strenuously not wanting him. He tried to keep up.

She disappeared under the frontage of the Victorian building that was the police station. He glanced at his watch. She was on time, as always. Not his trait, but her mother’s.

There was a knock on the door.

‘Come in,’ he said.

Sandys entered, with a sheaf of papers in his hand.

‘What have we got?’ Wilde asked. ‘Anything?’

‘Not much.’

Wilde walked round his desk. ‘Show me.’

Sandys handed him the first sheet. ‘Anna Miles. Nothing. No criminal record. Driving licence. No credit cards. No mortgage records.’

Wilde looked at the sheet critically. Sandys gave him the next. ‘Alisha Graham. Address in Manningham, checks out. Sister living. Car is hers. Got a record.’

Wilde looked up at him, not the sheet. ‘Alisha Graham has a criminal record? For what?’

‘Obstruction and possession.’

‘Possession?’ Wilde echoed, astounded.

Sandys grinned. ‘1978. Two counts. Speed. Got six months.’

‘You’re joking. Drugs? A woman like that?’

‘It’s all here in the sheet.’

‘How old was she?’

‘Let’s see,’ Sandys said, referring back to the papers. ‘Fifty.’

‘And doing what? What job?’ Wilde asked.

‘Down on the list as a lecturer at Knettleworth.’

Wilde shook his head in disbelief. ‘And the obstruction?’

‘Same time. It was some sort of student strike.’

Light dawned a little in Wilde’s mind. ‘Student strikes at the university. I remember.’ He remembered the occupation of the Vice Chancellor’s office; if he recalled right, over the dismissal of a Marxist on the staff. ‘Was she a Communist? An activist?’

Sandys shrugged. ‘No record.’ The man laughed. ‘Quite a joke.’

Wilde considered. ‘Speed is not a whim,’ he said. ‘Or a joke.’

‘She claimed it was someone else’s,’ Sandys said.

‘OK. Let it pass,’ Wilde said. ‘What else?’

‘Ran the girl’s fingerprints through,’ Sandys said. ‘Nothing.’

‘Get on to the Missing Persons Bureau at the Yard,’ Wilde said. ‘See if they know her.’

Sandys raised an eyebrow.

‘I know,’ Wilde said. ‘So they’ll come up with a hundred missing teenage girls. Or a thousand … we’ll just have to sort through them.’

‘OK,’ Sandys said.

There was another hasty knock at Wilde’s door: Alice came in, breathless from running up the stairs. She rushed over to her father, and flung one arm about his neck, and kissed him unselfconsciously on the cheek. ‘Hi, Dave,’ she said to Sandys.

Wilde looked at her. There was a grass stain on her jawline. He wet his thumb and tried to rub it off: laughing, she caught his hand, and took over herself.

‘You missed it,’ he said.

‘There?’

‘There. What’ve you been doing?’

‘Cricket.’

He shook his head.

‘Why not?’ she demanded.

‘Because the boys don’t do netball.’

She laughed. ‘They’re not up to it. No co-ordination, no patience.’

He smiled. ‘Can you give us a minute?’

She pulled a face. ‘Only a minute.’ She went out into the corridor, leaving the door open. They could hear her whistling.

Wilde sifted through the papers, considered, and put them on his desk. ‘Is the girl still downstairs?’

‘With the doctor,’ Sandys confirmed.

‘Has she said anything?’

‘Not a word.’

‘Did you give her a drink—a cup of tea? Offer her breakfast?’

‘Yes. She just smiled. I gave her some tea.’

‘Forensic seen her?’

‘First thing.’

Wilde fretted, pacing. ‘She’s in a car with a dead woman … and she smiles.’

‘It’s a proper smile, too,’ Sandy observed. ‘I mean, it isn’t crazy, it’s not vacant. She doesn’t look traumatized. It’s a just a little, everyday, polite smile.’

‘Is she deaf?’ Wilde wondered aloud. ‘Deaf mute?’

Alice came back to the door. ‘Dad, please.’

‘I’ll be back in half an hour,’ he told Sandys. ‘I want to talk to the doctor—and the girl.’

He put out his hand for Alice to take.

Smiling, she hooked her hand under his arm, and pulled him away down the corridor.

She thought of motion.

Not a movement of her own. After all, there was no need for that.

Instead, the girl thought of the motion of water. A little water running through strands of grass, over stone, down the long, long gradient through forest. Thought of the stream just below the summit. Thought of it dropping three thousand feet through the forest to the lake. Thought of water running out of the lake, through fells, through farmland. Little water. Little murmuring moving water. Little drops of water. Drops of water scouring grains of earth, taking mountains to the sea through green fields, dark slopes. Water pouring, unseen, under streets. Thought of water in the sea, the motion of waves, the movement of currents.

She imagined herself in one of those currents, carried tirelessly down. There was no need at all to move, even to scoop her hand through the wave. It bore her down the long liquid avenues, effortlessly, silently. She had only one task—to lie back and look at the stars. And to find the Gate.

Little drops of water, little grains of sand …

‘Open your eyes for me,’ said a voice.

She did as she was told—opened her eyes, and looked at the doctor.

‘Look at the chart.’

She looked.

‘Can you read the chart for me?’

He came around the side of her chair, and looked intently into her face. ‘No?’

She smiled.

‘Can you read letters?’

She smiled.

‘Are you English? Do you understand English?’

She smiled.

He pushed a piece of paper, and a pen, across the top of the table next to them. ‘Would you like to write anything down? Would that be easier?’

She looked at the paper, but didn’t move her hands.

He picked up her right hand, and looked at it, looked closely at the fingertips, the colour of the nails, the palm. Gently, he pushed back the edge of her sleeve, that came just below the elbow. He looked at the skin on the inside of the elbow, checking both arms.

‘Do you take any medicine?’ he asked.

She smiled, not at him, but at her innocent hands now curled in her lap.

She thought of hands plunged into water, into the wave. Thought of the same hands on the sharp, fine strings, the taste of dust, the smell of the violin cases, the sensation of the crowds, more oceans and seas, a sea of faces and hands and instruments. Carried with the strong sweet wave of music. She thought of Anna Miles, face turned intently over the black-and-white bars of sound, long hair falling over the bow, obscuring her face so that she became all hands, strings, instrument. The sun falling into the fine high colour of her hair, across the dusty practice-room floor. The plastic-seated chairs, warm in the heat. Dozens of other intently bent heads and fumbling fingers, trying to get the melody right. Thought of herself, another face in the back row. Anna Miles suddenly looking up.

And across the rows, the violins, the other faces and hands, she recognized the same look in Anna Miles’ face that she had in her own heart, that frozen empty fear.

Anna Miles looked different now. Much older. Older than she must be. Thirty? Thirty-one? Her hair was still the same length though. Still the same colour.

She had been carried for miles on the same strange currents.

Swept on the tide.

The doctor straightened up, frowning. ‘Come and stand on these scales for me,’ he said.

She did as she was told, watching as he checked the reading.

‘Eleven stone two,’ he said. ‘And you’re …’ He looked at his sheet. ‘Five foot eight. That’s what we call well nourished.’

She inclined her head.

He sat down and wrote on the file in front of him. Afterwards, he looked up and continued to stare at her for some time, his fingers steepled in front of him. ‘Is there anything you would like to tell me?’ he asked.

She watched him, but said nothing.

‘Do you have your own doctor, someone that you would prefer to talk to?’

She studied his face, listened to the sound of his voice, heard its strained tone. He was tall, sandy-haired, with a freckled complexion. She concentrated on the drifts of faint colour on his skin, and connected them to no one, just as she connected his questions to nothing, least of all herself. She heard the shape of the words, their hard and soft edges.

Once you had practised this for some time, it became easy, an art of a kind. The desire to respond, ingrained since birth, the necessity to make contact, was easily lost, given up like a worthless gift, an unwanted talent. Other people talked. They talked at great length, if you allowed them to. And once they had exhausted the topic of your own silence, they began talking about themselves. The doctor did not disappoint her now.

‘I once knew someone else like you,’ he said. ‘A child. A boy.’ He paused. She waited.

‘He had had a very tough time,’ the doctor said. ‘With his father.’

She watched, waited, listened. Hearing the tidal rhythms far away, a distant and reassuring beat. Carrying her forward to the place where she wanted to be.

‘Perhaps something like that happened to you,’ the doctor said, kindly. ‘Something you would like to talk about, but can’t.’

She remained still.

‘Perhaps you would like to talk to a woman,’ he offered.

She gave him a smile, and closed her eyes.

‘Is that what you’d like?’ he persisted.

Sooner or later, she told herself, he would go away.