FOURTEEN

A Place To Sleep

 

“My name is Alex Rappaport and I’m not a criminal. At least, I don’t think I am.”

That was the beginning of the most extraordinary story Madeleine had ever heard. A story that at times she doubted could be true, at times she was sure it was nothing more than an elaborate lie, the most fantastical embroidery anyone could possibly dream up. And at other times, she believed it totally. The times when Alex proved to her that it couldn’t be a lie, that what he was telling her had to be fact. Otherwise, how could he know the things he knew?

That was the question she kept coming back to in her mind. The question that, until she could answer satisfactorily, anchored his tale firmly in reality. Her problem was, reality had taken a side step into The Twilight Zone.

“My name is Alex Rappaport, and I’m not a criminal. At least, I don’t think I am.”

Alex leaned back against the door of the saloon, facing Madeleine squarely, his body turned so he could look at her without having to turn his head and giving her the opportunity to study him. His body language telling her he meant her no harm

Madeleine stared at Alex with a confused mixture of apprehension and curiosity but no fear. The time for fear was past. Now he had taken her up on her offer, her decision to return for him did not seem so hare-brained or idiotic. There was a sense about him that seemed to calm her nerves and she smiled suddenly at him. If Alex was shocked to see that smile, he was no more shocked than she was to feel it tug at her lips, it came unbidden from a place inside her she did not know existed and for a split second she felt that it was the first really genuine smile that had crossed her face for three long years. She spoke. She almost said, pleased to meet you, Alex, but that seemed out of place. Instead she said, “That’s an odd thing to say,” and realised that was odd in its own right. She felt a giggle build inside her and this surprised her perhaps more than anything else she had felt. Maybe she was going insane? That would explain a lot of things. She suppressed the urge to laugh, it would not be appropriate.

“I’m sorry. I… don’t know what to say. I just…” Alex stumbled over his words, their ineptitude tangling his tongue. “It’s been an odd sort of day,” he blurted out. This time, Madeleine couldn’t help it. The insanity of the situation and the understatement of his words, delivered with such ingenuous, unconscious comic timing pulled the giggle out of her mouth. The look of dazed confusion on Alex’s face at her sudden outburst of mirth did nothing to suppress the attack of laughter and she sat in the driver’s seat, one bruised, tender palm clamped to her mouth trying to stop her cackle.

“I’m sorry,” she said when she managed to regain control of herself, “it’s… it certainly has.” Alex relaxed somewhat in the passenger seat. She looked at him again in the darkness, totally sober now. “I don’t believe you do mean me harm, Alex. And if you say you are not a criminal, then I believe you, for now, at least.”

“Thank you,” he muttered with an audible sigh of relief.

Now she did say it. “Pleased to meet you, Alex.” She held her hand out to him expecting him to grasp it but he made no attempt to take her hand, just nodded at her and replied:

“Likewise, Madeleine,” there was a slight pause between the two words as if he was seeking approval to call her by name.

“What now?”

Alex shook his head, “I don’t know. I’m tired, I need sleep. And I owe you an explanation, but not right now. It’s a long story and I think I need to rest a little before I tell you. I need to think a bit, it’s all still…” His voice trailed off and he shrugged and made a sound that was part laugh part sigh, “. . .I don’t know.” He sneezed suddenly.

“Okay,” she said, in understanding. “Tell me in your own time. For now, I think you need to get warm too.” The chill of the winter evening and the cold wetness of the rain had pervaded the car’s interior, the engine was off and the heater was not working. The windscreen had steamed. Madeleine started the car and rubbed a clear space in front of her eyes. They had been stationary for some time, now with a decision made, it was time to move on. They had been the only car on the road in all the time they had been there. She had not even seen a car when she left Alex on the side of the road and driven off in a squeal of tyres and a rush of adrenalin. They were on a bend, blind to drivers coming from the opposite direction. They had been lucky so far, but it would only take one idiot, coming too fast around the curve and they could be hurt. She slipped the car into gear and pulled away. The heater rumbled quietly and she opened the vents to clear the mist from the glass.

She glanced at Alex and wondered again what it was that was so compelling about him. She was going to find out. “You can sleep at my house. And then you can tell me, Alex. Everything. Who those men were, why you aren’t sure if you’re a criminal or not, everything.”

He didn’t reply for a long time and she drove in silence, dragging the car down unfamiliar lanes making their way towards a main road and civilisation, searching for and finally finding a road sign that would lead her home. When he did speak she barely heard his words above the noise of the heater and the car’s tyres singing on the wet road.

“Thank you for trusting me.”

Just don’t make me regret it, she thought. “It will be a while before we get home. Why don’t you close your eyes, I’ll wake you when we get there.”

Alex shook his head. “No. Those men you mentioned, they’ll still be looking for me. Them or others like them. I need to get somewhere safe before I can begin to relax.”

“Who are they?”

“I never saw them before today.”

“But you know who they are?”

“I know what they are,” he said enigmatically. He sounded paranoid to his own ears, but knew he wasn’t. He thought Madeleine knew also. Paranoia doesn’t come running up and start banging a fist on your car window. “They’re dangerous.”

A shiver ran down Madeleine’s spine. “What would they do to you, if they caught you?”

“I don’t want to find out.” His answer hung heavily in the air and brought their conversation to a close, Madeleine didn’t know what to say in reply and Alex seemed not to want to say anything more. She did not speak again until they were approaching the house.

A long drive led through tall conifers shielding the house from the quiet road. Mature lawns stretched from the stand of tall trees to the large bay window to the left of the front door. The flowerbeds were bare now but in summer would surround the lawns in vivid rainbows of colour. The tyres crunched gravel as Madeleine drove slowly down the drive. The conifers ran the length of the property on both sides as well as across the front affording plenty of privacy.

“Open the glove box,” she told him. He pulled down the door of the small compartment. “Open the garage.” The glove box was mostly empty and he saw the small black box immediately. There was a button on the top surface and a tiny glass bubble. He pointed the box through the windscreen and pressed the button. The little glass bubble lit up red and ahead of them, the garage door began to ease up. Madeleine drove in and parked next to a small red coupe; it’s paintwork gleaming in the bright light that had come on in the garage. Alex pressed the button again in response to her look and the door closed gently.

“Well, we’re here,” she said opening the car door and getting out, “come on.” Alex followed her to the doorway in the wall where she took a key from the ring that held the car keys and unlocked the door. A strident bleeping interrupted the silence and Madeleine quickly moved to the alarm panel and entered the pass code. A two-tone bleep registered the number and the warning cut out. She turned around and held the door open for Alex to enter the utility room connected to the garage.

“Welcome to my home,” she said and smiled at him.

He followed her through into the spacious kitchen, Madeleine turning on lights as she went. The central heating had switched on earlier and the house was warm, even so, Madeleine felt a tremor of cold nervousness, a twinge of doubt about what she had done. She brushed it aside. There was no point. She’d gone back for him and now she had brought him home. In the same way she knew the time for fear had passed out in the lane, she knew now the time for these doubts had also passed. Alex was here, at her invitation, and that’s all there was to it. She saw his reflection in the window by the sink, the glass a black mirror beyond the taps. He was standing at the door to the kitchen. She picked up the kettle and filled it.

“Do you want a drink?” She turned around to face him. He nodded at her, still unable to find his voice and she looked at him, seeing him properly for the first time, she realised, without being distracted by panic or fear or confusion and without the dark to hide his features.

He was a mess. His clothing was stained and dirty, streaks of dried mud coated his jeans and his trainers which had looked so white in the blackness of the country lane now looked grimed and worn. The jacket he wore was snagged and ripped, ragged tears, the shower proof material frayed along the edges of the cuts, marked his torso, caused by his diving through the hedgerow.

His hands and face were grubby and his hair was unruly, sticking up in places, plastered to his skull with rain and sweat in others. A small cut grazed the flesh above his left eye.

He felt her scrutiny and self-consciously ran hands through his hair. She saw the bruising on the back of his hand where the seagull had pecked him. And she saw his eyes, even in the light of the kitchen they were nearly as dark as his hair, beautiful eyes, haunting. And haunted. He stood there, shyly, nervous, looking like a lost child.

“Yes, please,” he answered her.

“Pardon?” She queried.

“A drink.”

“Oh,” she was still holding the kettle, forgotten in her study of him. She turned away, a blush of embarrassment rising in her cheeks, placed the kettle on its pad and switched it on. “Sit down,” she spoke to his reflection. “Is coffee okay?”

Alex pulled a chair from under the large pine table in the middle of the room. “Fine.”

Madeleine saw her own reflection in the glass and felt uncomfortable herself. Her hair was the worse for the weather, her blonde colouring darkened by rain, tangled and knotted. Her clothes were soiled from her fall, the white blouse a washed out grey. She glanced down at herself and saw the hole in her tights and the scuffed leather of her shoes. She slipped out of the shoes and put coffee into two mugs. The kettle boiled and she poured water onto the granules of instant.

“Milk? Sugar?”

“Neither.”

She poured a little milk into her own mug, stirred it quickly and took the drinks to the table. She sat opposite and stared at him. How did you know Doug’s name? She started to say, but stopped after the How. The question had been there all the time, she had forced herself not to ask it until now. Now she felt she needed the answer, deserved it. It was that more than anything else that had taken her back to him. That and his letting her go. But as she started to speak, something stopped her. A fear of knowing the answer held her tongue. A sense of “what if…” that reined her in. What if he hadn’t known her husband’s name? What if he had just been guessing? She had already discounted that, but here in the glow of the lights, sitting in her kitchen across from him, the thought surfaced again. So she stopped. She had promised him he could rest before he told her his story, she would keep her word. Besides, he looked like he needed it.

“Black coffee isn’t usually the thing to drink when you want to sleep,” she said instead. There were bags under those beautiful, dark eyes.

“I don’t think it will make any difference,” Alex managed around a yawn and he sneezed again, covering his face with his hand.

She put her coffee down and stood up. “Come on,” she said, “I’ll show you where you can sleep.

Alex pushed his chair back, the wooden legs scraping loudly along the polished floor. He was mentally drained, he saw the concerned smile on his host’s face and was grateful to her beyond all efforts to say so. He followed her through the house and up the broad staircase, lifting his feet with a sluggishness that threatened to overwhelm him, the stairs seemed to soften under his tread, the thick carpet envelop him as if he were wading through them rather than walking on them. Madeleine was speaking, his brain fumbled the words breaking them down into manageable portions.

“. . . shower. There are fresh towels on the rack.” She was pointing through the door she had just opened. Alex nodded thickly and followed her with his gaze as she crossed the landing and opened another door. “You can sleep here,” he made it to the doorway, looked in at the room, plainly but comfortably decorated. “Leave your clothes out here, I’ll see what I can do with them while you sleep.”

“Thank you,” he said.

Madeleine stood there a moment, awkwardly, then said, “Right, well. I’ll leave you to it then.” She gave him that smile that he was quickly becoming used to, the smile that said he was welcome but she didn’t quite know why, then she was gone, turning on her heels and taking the stairs back to the ground floor. Alex watched her descent before walking, almost staggering over to the bathroom. He stripped off his clothes, leaving them outside the door as she asked and stepped under the hot needle spray of the shower.

The last thing he thought he needed at this point was to get wet again, but he had seen himself in the window and again in the mirror in the hallway downstairs and there was no doubt he was in serious need of a clean up. The water was hot and he felt soothed by the patter of it striking his flesh. He held his head under the spray for long minutes, letting the water cascade over him, hoping it would wash away all the things he didn’t want to think about, like his every waking moment for the last week for instance. He felt his eyes prick with tears, hot and unexpected. A wave of self-pity washed over him and he reached out before a sob burst from his lips and grasped the water control, turning the tap from hot to cold. The shower was good and reacted instantly. The sudden blast of cold water shocked his system and he did utter a cry, but of shock rather than sorrow. He withstood the iciness for as long as he could and then turned the heat back on. The cold water had shocked him awake enough to wash and he lathered up with plenty of shower gel, scrubbed himself as if to wash away his fears and troubles before standing under the hot water once more, sluicing away his self pity and other useless emotions with the soapy water.

He towelled himself dry with the last of his energy and, wrapping a towel about him, crossed to the bedroom Madeleine had showed him earlier. He pushed the door closed, pulled back the duvet and lay on the crisp, clean sheet, pulling the cover over him. His head hit the pillow and he was instantly asleep.