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Inspector Malcolm did not like the case of Yuan Ju. He had at first. He’d imagined the story in the papers. A wealthy landowner keeping a young foreign sex slave locked in the cellar. It had seemed almost too good to be true. And so it had transpired.
He wasn’t sure what the story actually was, but it was not the simple and straightforward case of the middle-aged pervert and the abused young girl. It threatened to be much more complicated, and not the story that would get him the national press attention he’d anticipated.
Inspector Malcolm was already looking for a way out of the case, and hoped that the translator would provide it the following day. It wouldn’t take much from Yuan Ju for him to be persuaded to either release her or hand her over to UK Borders. Either one and she’d be off his hands. He might almost have been prepared to give her to Pitt that evening, although it had only been after an hour’s reflection since Pitt had left the station that he’d come to his great dislike of the case.
As he drank his seventh coffee of the day, while working his way through a packet of biscuits, Inspector Malcolm knew that, by the same time the following evening, Yuan Ju would be gone. He had lost interest, and that lack of interest seeped down through the station.
Ju was a small problem far removed from the usual drunk teenagers and breaches of the peace and angry neighbours who provided the station’s staple diet and its natural comfort zone. Malcolm was not the only one who would gladly see Ju released as soon as possible.
*
Pitt walked into the kitchen. Daisy was at the sink; Mrs Cromwell was by the fire. Pitt closed the door and stood for a moment. He didn’t know what he was expecting. It was so long since he and Daisy had had a proper conversation, that he hardly imagined that there would be one now.
Mrs Cromwell did not turn, although, even if she had, Pitt would not have noticed.
Daisy’s face was set, her lips tight. She was washing a mug, one that she had used four hours previously. She had been drinking wine since then. She turned off the tap and set the mug to the side of the sink. She rested her hands on the sink’s edge and stared out of the window.
Pitt stood still, just inside the door, waiting for her to turn. Of all the people he was leaving behind, only the men who’d worked for him for all these years engendered within him any feeling of loyalty.
Daisy turned, her face set hard. She had had to live for years with Pitt’s seeming determination not to say anything unless he really had to. Now she was going to bless him with the same taciturnity.
‘I’m leaving,’ he said abruptly. ‘Tomorrow. I’ve left Jenkins in charge of the vineyard. It’s your business now, you can do what you like, but you’d be as well leaving him to run things. He knows what he’s doing.’
‘You’re not coming back?’ she said, her surprise at what he’d said about Jenkins forcing the words from her mouth. She had never been able to keep quiet for long. Nothing changes.
‘No.’
So many other questions raced into her head, but then so did the earlier determination to make him work for his conversation. She could ask him twenty questions and be lucky to get one answer. She stood and stared.
Pitt took a step closer to her. He might have spoken if Mrs Cromwell had not been there. He reached into his pocket and took out the receipt from the bank. One hundred and thirty thousand pounds paid into Daisy’s bank account.
He held out the paper, she did not immediately take it from him. He did not waver, the small receipt held perfectly still in his extended hand.
He’d had no reason to give her any money. She would never have known. It was some last act of sympathy for her, as if acknowledging that a perfectly good woman had been wasted by all the years of living under the miserable maternal yoke. Maybe he hoped that by giving Daisy the money she would also choose to walk away. Escape.
She took the receipt from him and glanced down at it. A second, then her face changed. Her eyes widened, narrowed again. She looked back up at him, having lost her usual look of contempt. Money talks.
So many years of non-verbal communication between them finally proved beneficial. They understood each other. She did not need to know where the money came from. She had not been deprived all these years; they had not lived in squalor. He was leaving, and he was not leaving her penniless. The money was for her, and not for Mrs Cromwell. She should keep her mouth shut, take time to decide what to do with it herself. He was leaving, and it was the last thing he would do for her.
He recognised something in her face that he had not seen in over thirty years; a softness that had last been there before they’d been married. Was that all it had taken? A hundred and thirty thousand pounds. If he’d paid her more regularly, would she have lived her life less bitterly?
He could not return the softness of expression, but they understood each other. It was between them and not for Mrs Cromwell, the blanket who had smothered their lives.
She folded the piece of paper and put it in her pocket. Pitt turned away from her and walked through the kitchen and into the corridor that led away to the rest of the house.
Daisy watched him out the door, glanced at the chair where her mother still sat with her back turned, and then turned back to the sink. The cosy, comfortable world of the kitchen was ending. It had been unpleasant and ill-tempered, a world defined by a complete lack of joyousness, but it was what she had known for so many years; the cold comfort of consistency. Like the Berlin wall and the Cold War. It had been ugly and bitter and absurd, but so many people and organisations had been lost without it; had struggled for years to come to terms when that world had ended.
She was in the first moments of realisation. Up to that point, up to the moment when Pitt had walked into the kitchen, she had assumed that the instance of Ju in the kitchen had been a curious moment in their lives, but one that would pass. They had made their move to get rid of her, and, after the surprising behaviour of Pitt in hiding Ju away in the basement, normality would be resumed.
Except it would not be. The wall was coming down. The safety barriers were being taken away. Suddenly, she was no longer tied to her husband, and with the money he had given her – while it was not an enormous amount, it was enough to be life-changing should she choose – she did not have to be tied to the vineyard. Or the kitchen. Or her mother.
‘What did he give you?’ said Mrs Cromwell from her chair by the fire.
*
They lay in bed together that night for the last time. Pitt’s small suitcase sat packed by the wardrobe. He was confident that Ju would be released the following day, and that even if it was not in time for the flight he’d booked, there would be a later plane. Even if he had to wait a day or two or longer, it was time to leave the farmhouse, the repression of the kitchen.
The following day he would be travelling with Ju. If she was not released in time, he would be somewhere else on his own. He would pragmatically make such a plan if it was required. Now that the tyranny of the kitchen – this room that held them all in such constipated stupefaction – had become clear to him, there was no going back. Ju was gone, and so too was Pitt.
Daisy did not fall asleep until three in the morning, Pitt an hour and a half later. They lay next to each other, backs turned, for nearly four hours, without saying a word. Without touching. Aware of each other more than they had been for decades, aware that the other was awake. They could have touched, they could have embraced. It would not have been far-fetched under the circumstances. The moment before their separation, they were closer than they had been in years; a natural drawing together, born of impending departure.
If Pitt had reached out to her, Daisy would have responded. If she had reached out to him, Pitt would have remained stiff and cold. He felt the melting of the hostility and resentment, but it meant nothing to him. He was not going to acquiesce to any false or temporary emotion. Too long had they been lost to each other.
For the first time in so many years that she had forgotten, Daisy lay in bed filled with sexual desire. She wanted him to touch her, she wanted to feel him, she wanted him pressed against her, wanted to feel him inside her.
Eventually, she fell asleep and dreamt of a man she had never met. Ninety minutes later, Pitt too fell asleep, although he had thought he would not.
*
So long did it take him to fall asleep in the first place, that when he awoke the morning was already much older than it usually would be. He sat up in bed, looked at his watch on the bedside table. Another sunny morning. 7:56. Daisy was not next to him.
He felt immediately that something was wrong.