Текст книги "The Risk of Darkness"
Автор книги: Susan Hill
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 19 страниц)
But suddenly, she tried to see Ed in her mind, and there was nothing. No one. A blank space. She looked at the house from her window, stared and stared at it to try and conjure up the picture of Ed but it wouldn’t come. Nothing came. She did not know what Ed looked like or sounded like. She couldn’t find Ed at all.
She got down and went out of her room, terrified. This was what her mother must mean, that Ed had gone and would never come back. Ed had even gone from her head, her mind, what she looked like, her voice, her smell, her laugh. She started to go down the stairs, afraid as she had never been before of her empty room and being in it alone, needing to hear her mother, see her, even her swearing and her irritation.
Natalie was coming up. Kyra stopped and looked down.
“What you doing?”
Kyra was silent.
“Come on, I’ve gotta go to the shops, get some stuff. What’s wrong with you, Kyra, for God’s sake, you look like you’ve seen a bleedin’ ghost.”
But she hadn’t. That was what was wrong. She hadn’t.
Very slowly, one at a time, Kyra came down the stairs.
There was always somebody outside now. Kids. Neighbours. People from the other side of the estate. They hung about, watching, talking to one another, waiting as the white suits came out, staring at what they carried, eyes following them back in. They knew better than to ask any questions. They just stood, waiting, hoping for something to happen, some excitement, and then television vans and men with furry microphones in their street.
Natalie dragged Kyra into the car and slammed the door so hard it made the windscreen rattle. Kyra did not look at Ed’s house or the watchers, she kept her eyes down. She said nothing.
Natalie muttered something under her breath as she screeched the car in reverse, crashed the gears and then shot forward, making Kyra rock sharply to and fro in her seat belt.
Once, Ed had taught her a game where you closed your eyes and said the name of a colour and then tried really, really hard to see it in your mind and nothing else. Just pink. Just green. Nothing else. “Even at the corners,” Ed had said. “Black,” Kyra thought now, and made her closed eyes stare and stare until all they could see was black. She could do it. She’d learned. But for a few seconds she tried quickly to see Ed, before the black came down.
“Ed,” she said to herself. But there was no Ed, even at the corners.
They were out for an hour and when they got back, there was another car, black, outside their own door. The watchers were keeping an eye on it at the same time as they oversaw the activities of the white suits, swivelling round the moment Natalie’s car turned the corner.
“There’s someone at our house. There’s a black car.”
“I’ve got bleedin’ eyes, Kyra.”
“What’s it there for?”
“Get out.” Natalie yanked the handbrake on and, as she left the car, put two fingers up to the watchers.
“What you done then, Nat?”
“Fuck off.” She pushed Kyra through the front door so hard she fell. Natalie hauled her up by one arm. “Watch where you’re putting your feet.”
The door banged.
There had been two people in the black car, they’d both seen that. Now, Natalie saw their shapes, on the other side of the front-door glass.
“Kyra, get upstairs.”
“I want—”
“Kyra c”
Kyra fled.
Natalie turned and waited for the doorbell to ring.
“DS Nathan Coates, DC Dawn Lavalle. Mrs Coombs?”
“No. Ms.”
“Sorry c Ms Natalie Coombs?”
“You bloody know I am.” She held the door open for them. In the sitting room, there was no chair which did not have something on it. Natalie shoved a few things at random on to the floor. “I suppose it’s about next door. You want a coffee?”
“Thanks, that’d be good. They keep us parched on this job.”
“Awww.” Natalie went to the kitchen. On the way, she glanced up the stairs. “Kyra, what did I say?”
There was a slight shuffling sound, and the closing of Kyra’s door.
When she got back, the ugly bloke was standing at the window looking across at next door.
The policewoman was examining a photograph of Kyra in burgundy taffeta as Natalie’s sister’s bridesmaid. “How old was she in that one, Natalie?”
“I didn’t say anything about Natalie.”
“Sorry c Ms Coombs.”
“Four. Sooo pretty.”
“Very. You must be proud of her.”
Natalie gave her a look. “Right, get on with it. It’s about next door—don’t take a genius to work that one out.”
“It is. We’ve got some questions for you, but then we need to talk to Kyra.”
“Oh no, I ent having that, she’s a kid.”
“And she went next door to see Miss Sleightholme quite regularly, I gather?”
“I wouldn’t say regularly. I didn’t let her.”
“Why not?”
“Well, you never know, do you? Someone on their own, having a little kid round all the time c not very normal, is it?”
“Did you think there was something not very normal about Edwina?”
“God, that’s funny c never even knew she was called that. Ed, she was. Never anything but Ed.”
“And how did she seem to you—Ed?”
Natalie shrugged.
“But you did let Kyra go there on her own?”
Natalie shrugged again.
“How often, would you say? Once a week? Three times a week?”
“I said, just c sometimes.”
“Once a month?”
“Well, I didn’t keep a fucking diary.”
“Was it just a casual thing, or did Ed invite her?”
Natalie sighed and lit a cigarette. She wondered what she’d have done without taking it up again.
“Kyra was always nagging to go round there and half the time I didn’t let her.”
“Why?”
“Well, it’s a nuisance, someone else’s kid from next door always wanting to mither you, must be c”
“Did she ever go without asking you?”
“She’s cunning is Kyra, she managed to slip out c made me mad.”
“Why?”
“Cos I don’t like her being disobedient, that’s why.”
“No other reason c to do with Ed?”
“Well, if I’d known about it then, bloody hell, of course she wouldn’t have gone near, would she? What kind of mother do you take me for?”
“But you didn’t know. Did you?”
“Of course I didn’t bloody know!”
“Fine, you made your point, Natalie. What I’m getting at is c was there anything about Ed’s behaviour that worried you c or did Kyra ever say anything c even just a hint?”
“No.”
“Nothing at all that you remember?”
“NO. I said NO. Is that it now?”
They got up. “If you think of anything c” Ginger head.
“I won’t.”
“OK, thanks for your time.”
“We’ll want to talk to Kyra. Someone’ll ring to make an appointment. I’ll bring another officer with me, from the child protection unit c”
“She won’t have anything to tell you. There’s nothing to tell. At least I hope there bloody isn’t.”
“Children pick up on things, that’s all c and anything she can say about what she did there, what they talked about c it may help.”
“But she’s arrested, isn’t she? No way is she coming back here? You got her.”
They walked to the door.
“She’s been arrested on one charge, yes. But we need a lot more information. That’s why we want to talk to Kyra.”
Natalie closed the front door and paused. There was another soft noise.
“Kyra c get down here.”
Kyra got.
Twenty-three
“I’m out of here,” Simon Serrailler said. He threw a file on to the others beside his desk and switched off his laptop. “Don’t call me, don’t expect me to call you.”
“Guv.” Nathan Coates followed the DCI out of his room. “Not even if c”
Simon looked at him. “Only a message,” he said. “And only news. Not no news.”
“Understood. You off abroad?”
“No. London.”
“Seeing any shows or that?”
Simon smiled. “You could say I am.” He ran fast down the stairs. “Yes.” He waved his hand and dodged out to the car before anyone else could get after him.
He’d had enough. It had been exhilarating, interesting, draining by turns and he wouldn’t have missed the last couple of weeks, but he needed to get away, from the station, police business, Lafferton. He had always thrived on cutting himself off and plunging into a different life, and as he drove towards the close, to get his things together before heading down the motorway, he was light-headed with pleasure. He was spending three days at the gallery supervising the setting up of his exhibition, after which there was the private view. Then he would see. Theatre, opera, good food, walking about London. He didn’t care, he made no exact plans. It was the way he preferred to relax, surprising himself each day.
He had booked his usual, comfortable room in a hotel overlooking some quiet gardens in Chelsea. It was unfussy and as unlike a hotel as he could have found. It was also expensive. When he went abroad Simon travelled light and spent little; he was happy in Ernesto’s modest flat in the Venice backwater or at a remote farmhouse bed and breakfast, a cheap parador. In London, he liked comfort and spent money.
As he joined the motorway and speeded up, he felt the usual shift, as if a switch had clicked within him. He left Ed Sleightholme, murdered children and kidnapped women behind, and his mind was cleared of them all. He was no longer DCI Serrailler, he was Simon Osler, with a solo exhibition of his drawings being staged at a Mayfair gallery. Many of the people who would come to look and to buy had no idea that he was a CID officer, and that was how he liked it. When he had had to deal with criminals who had led double lives he had usually understood and empathised. In itself, to lead two lives was not a crime; it depended on what you did in them. If he had been forced to choose between his two he would have found it difficult. They balanced one another; neither life was quite enough on its own.
Twice he heard his mobile ring but it was in his jacket on the back seat. He would check the messages when he stopped next. He had not left all of his involvement in current cases behind him.
Dennis Vindon from forensics got up from his hands and knees and went to the window. Outside, it was quiet. People had grown bored. There was nothing to see but white suits going out to the van from time to time, carrying things which they put inside before plodding back and closing the front door. The things were wrapped and no one could have any idea what they were. Dennis knew. They were sections of carpet. Cushions. Pieces of linoleum. The scrapings from the inside of cupboards. Bed sheets. Things bagged, tied and labelled.
No one spoke to the white suits and the white suits neither spoke to nor looked at the women hanging about the gate. It was always women, Dennis thought now, looking down at the sunlit street. Men—even unemployed men—didn’t seem to have the ghoulish interest in watching a crime scene. If this was a crime scene. He had been at a good many and he had never known a neater, cleaner, more orderly house. And it was not a house that had been urgently scrubbed to erase traces, it was a house that was always tidy, clean and orderly. Nice house really. You had to say that. A few books. Some pretty china that looked like Victorian. Coloured cushions. It was a house someone had enjoyed putting together. He had a sense of things when he went to pull a place apart and his sense here was that there had been no crime committed; no one had been tortured or killed here. None of the missing children had been pushed into a cupboard under the stairs or their clothes taken out and burned in the garden incinerator. If Sleightholme was the abductor of the missing children, she had done nothing at home and brought nothing to it.
Jo Caper walked into the room and whistled.
They both stood at the window now, looking out.
“There isn’t going to be anything there either,” Dennis said at last. The garden was tidy and well kept. A rectangle of lawn. Flower beds on either side, with rose bushes and a buddleia, a lilac tree at the bottom. A standard six-by-four shed which had been stripped already. A table with two plastic garden chairs upended on to it. “Pity, that.”
Because, by the end of the week, they were going to have to dig it up. Waste of time, waste of effort especially in the sun; there would be nothing buried in the garden. He just knew.
“You?”
Jo shook her head. “Nothing. Just finished bagging up her clothes. That’s it then in the bedrooms.”
“Any news on the car?”
“I heard Luke say there might be. Tomorrow maybe.”
“That’s where it’ll be. If there’s anything. It’s always the car.”
“No it’s not.”
“Yeah, yeah, but this time I just know it.”
“Ah, you’ve got your bent coat hanger out?”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“I heard.”
Dennis had once, just the once, doused a garden and found a well beneath a newly laid patio, and a body plus a lot of water.
“Right. Back to the underlay.”
“You want a Coke?”
“Nah, be lukewarm.”
“No, I put it in the fridge downstairs.”
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Probably not,” Jo said, sailing out.
In her own house, Kyra sat in front of a My Little Ponyvideo behind drawn curtains. Occasionally, she got up and pulled one back to peer at Ed’s house but there was never anything to see.
My Little Ponyhad sickly voices and tinkly music and Kyra hated it, but she daren’t switch the video off in case her mother heard and came in. Natalie was on the phone to Donna Campbell, her best friend.
Kyra sat back on the sofa and closed her eyes, but this time she didn’t try to see a block of colour or black velvet; she went in her mind through Ed’s front door and into each room of the house in turn, checking on things—the furniture, the books, the flowery cups and saucers, the two clown dolls dangling from the shelf.
She tried to remember everything. Then she would know what the white suits had taken or moved around. She meant to get into Ed’s house somehow– she had to get into it. She felt that Ed would want her to, would trust her and no one else to check on things.
Her mother woke her, raking the curtains open and shouting. The television had been switched off.
“Get up, I gotta take you out.”
“Where are we going?”
“See someone. Come on, Kyra, move, you need your hair brushing and a clean T-shirt, I’m not having people think I don’t bother.”
“What sort of someone are we going to see?”
“You’ll find out when we get there.”
“Where?”
“Oh, bloody hell, Kyra, you’re one big blasted question mark, you.”
Natalie was furious. She and Donna had decided to take their kids to the supermarket where there was a supervised play area. They could shop a bit, have a coffee, talk, and not be mithered all afternoon by Kyra and Donna’s kid. The fact that Kyra said she hated Danny Campbell was irrelevant to Natalie. When she had asked Kyra why she hated him, Kyra had said it was because he bit her when no one was looking. But the marks on Kyra’s arm never looked like bites. More like pinches, and what kid didn’t get pinched from time to time?
“Pinch him back,” Natalie had said, “that’ll teach him. Don’t be a wimp, Kyra, you’ll get nowhere in this world being a wimp.”
But when Natalie had put the phone down after making the arrangement, it had rung again and it was the police, saying she’d to take Kyra down now, there was a meeting arranged for them to talk to her. They wouldn’t change it. It had to be now.
Natalie wrenched Kyra’s head round to redo her ponytail. “Bloody keep still, will you?”
“Where are we going?”
Natalie shook her head through a mouthful of pink nylon scrunchy.
As they went out two of the white suits were getting into the van, and as Natalie started the car another came out of Ed’s front door, locked it and put the key in her white-suit pocket. Kyra stared at her hard, trying to memorise everything so that she could tell Ed.
Twenty-four
There were a dozen people kneeling in the Chapel of Christ the Healer. Cat Deerbon joined them at the back. The evening sun sifted through the side-aisle windows, so that the light was a dusty gold. She came to the healing service as often as possible and tonight two of her own patients were in the front pews.
Footsteps came across the chancel and as Cat looked round, she saw that it was Jane Fitzroy. There had been a paragraph in the local paper about her ordeal at the hands of Max Jameson, and Cat’s mother, Meriel Serrailler, had mentioned that Jane was staying with the Precentor and his family for a few days. Cat glanced at her as she went by but could read nothing into her expression, though she seemed to hesitate slightly before going up the single step to the altar.
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
“Amen.”
“Christ Jesus, who healed those brought to him in sickness of body and mind, hear our prayers this evening for those present and elsewhere who come to you in faith. Give the strength, comfort and assurance of your presence with us at the laying on of hands and look graciously on all who c on c”
Jane’s voice faltered. For a moment, she was quiet and seemed to be gathering herself together to continue. Then, without warning, her body folded and crumpled as she fainted.
There was a murmur. Cat got up and went quickly over. She knelt beside her.
“Jane? Can you hear me? It’s Dr Deerbon.” She took her wrist. The pulse was weak and Jane’s face was chalk white, but her eyelids fluttered and she tried to move her arm. “You’re fine, you just fainted. Don’t sit up for a moment.” Cat turned and looked at the anxious faces in front of her. “Don’t worry. She’s fainted. I don’t know why, but that’s all it is.”
Jane was trying to sit up and there was a little colour in her cheeks. She looked upset and embarrassed.
Half an hour later, they were both in the sitting room of the Precentor’s house. The French windows were open on to the garden and the smell of stocks came in from the terrace.
“I feel a complete idiot.”
“Yes, well, enough said.” Rhona Dow was pouring tea. “I didtell her, Cat.”
“I’m sure you did.” Cat and Jane exchanged a quick glance.
“She had a frightful shock and she shouldn’t be rushing to get back to normal c andto make a start in the very chapel where that man c Honestly, Jane.”
“I was sure I was OK. I can’t sit about your house doing crossword puzzles for ever. I’m not a convalescent, I’m perfectly all right.”
“So why did you faint?” Rhona looked triumphant. “Why did she, Cat?”
“No idea. But I’m not worried. Come and see me in the surgery though,” she said to Jane. “We’ll do a blood test for luck. I doubt if it will be anything other than absolutely normal but let’s play safe.”
“And Iwill make the appointment,” Rhona Dow said decisively.
A telephone rang.
When she had swept out to answer it, Cat and Jane dared not meet one another’s eye.
“Whatever,” Cat said, smiling into her tea. “But do come and see me. I like to check new patients anyway.”
“I did register with you the week I arrived because c”
“Rhona told you to?”
“Hm.”
“Do you feel up to a walk round their garden? It’s the nicest in the close.”
“I know. I live at the bottom of it, remember.”
Cat had. She wanted to see if Jane avoided her bungalow, which would give her an idea of what lasting impact her time there with Max had made on her.
Rhona’s voice was still booming through the hall behind them.
“She has been a brick,” Jane said now, “so kind, so good c so has Joseph. They’ve simply treated me as if I’d always lived there.”
“But you are now beginning to find it all a bit oppressive.”
“Isn’t that shameful?”
They started to wander down the lawn.
“Understandable, I’d say. I can only take Rhona in small doses.”
“I’m so glad you were in the chapel. Thanks. I don’t know what they thought, poor things.”
“They were concerned for you.”
“It’s been quite a week or two. My mother was burgled and beaten up, I’d only just started to feel my way into Lafferton—it’s a big job for me—then Max.”
“I don’t wonder you fainted. I noticed you’d started straight in at Imogen House.”
“Yes. And I’ve had a lot of meetings at Bevham General, learning the ropes there.”
“We needed to meet—just not this way.”
They went through the trellis which divided the garden and turned right down a path between the fruit trees. The corner of Jane’s bungalow was in sight. Cat felt her tense slightly, then stop.
“OK?”
Jane took a deep breath, then said, “Will you come in with me? Once I’ve been in it’ll be all right.” For a split second, she hesitated again, but then went straight forward, round the corner of the bushes and up to her front door.
“Oh. They’ve changed the lock of course, they told me. I think someone up at the house has the new keys.”
“Never mind. Go to the window.”
Jane glanced at her, then moved up to the glass, cupped her hands round her eyes and peered in.
“All right?”
“Yes. It looks like someone else’s house. I don’t recognise that I’ve lived there at all. How odd. I feel I shouldn’t be looking in.”
“But do you feel anxious?”
“No.” Jane turned. “Detached from it really.”
“Fine. You’re doing well. Next time, get the keys and go in. You’ll have to sooner or later so make it sooner. I think you’ll feel at home again.”
“Maybe. I’m not sure how much I’ve felt at home here anyway, even without Max. Not sure if I feel at home in Lafferton.”
Cat was silent. Jane might want to confide in her but now was not the time and after a few seconds they walked back into the garden, enjoying the first faint brush of evening cool.
The terrace was empty and there was no sound from the house.
“Can I ask you something?” Jane gestured to Cat to sit on the bench against the wall. The sun was touching the tips of the fruit trees ahead of them but the bench was in shadow. “I feel I have to go and see Max. What do you think?”
“Why do you feel that?”
“He’s in trouble. His wife’s death affected him very badly. He wasn’t trying to hurt me—as me—he was exploding with grief and anger and I got in the way. I think he needs help. Well, it’s obvious he does.”
“You may well be right but are you the person to offer it?”
“Because I’m a priest?”
“No, because of what he did—there’s no getting away from that, is there? You haven’t pressed charges against him but it was a pretty desperate way to behave and you’ve been in shock because of it, to put it mildly. Perhaps stand back a bit? Max is my patient—let me do it.”
“But that’s medical help c maybe he does need that but I wanted to tell him it was all right.”
“And that you forgive him?”
“Exactly. I suppose you think that sounds too pious.”
“Not at all. Perhaps you could write to him if you think you need to say it?”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that, it would be so cold.”
And you, Cat thought, looking at her, are quite the opposite—and perhaps too much so for your own good. She studied Jane Fitzroy’s face now in profile, surrounded by the rich, springing Titian hair. She was not only beautiful but had a face with character—an unusual, thoughtful, intelligent face. Her skin was enviable, gardenia cream, her eyes green-flecked hazel, wide and direct. She would not fade into any background but there was a stillness and a depth to her, beneath the surface anxiety and tension.
“I have to get home,” Cat said, standing up. “Look, do what you think is right but do it carefully. God, how patronising, of course you will. And make that appointment to come into surgery. This is your doctor speaking.”
Two hours later, after supper, Jane went to find Rhona Dow. She was cutting out a dress on the long table in what had once been the playroom at the top of the house; the Dows had three sons, all now away from home, one still at university, the other two both priests and both working abroad. Jane suspected that Rhona had been anxious to invite her to stay as much for her company and to muffle the emptiness of the big house as anything else. She was grateful. But she also knew that she had to move out.
“My dear, do sit down, shove all that stuff off the chair. I let this room get like a tip when I’m dressmaking, it seems to help.”
“I love the fabric c what is it?”
“Here.” Rhona pushed the cover of the dress pattern across. “I need something smartish—there are garden parties and fêtes and weddings and teas with bishops from now until September and everything in the wardrobe has been about in public for too many years.”
“I can’t thread a needle.”
“Well, you do other things. Have a square of chocolate.”
A large bar of Galaxy was open on the table beside the sewing machine. Rhona Dow was a heavy woman and after twenty-four hours with her Jane had understood why.
“I’ve come to tell you that I’m going back into the garden house tonight. You have been wonderful and it’s made all the difference being here but I have to get back, Rhona. I know you’ll understand.”
There flickered across Rhona’s face an expression that Jane found all too easy to read. When she left, the house would be empty. Rhona busied herself as she could but Joseph was out a lot and it was clear that she was lonely.
“I won’t start trying to persuade you to change your mind, my dear. Only if you aren’t happy down there after that business, promise you’ll come back. Even in the middle of the night. We shan’t mind a bit.”
“I promise. Thank you.”
“Well, at the very least let me pack you up some things c you’ll need bread and milk and—”
“No, I’ll drive over to the supermarket. Honestly. I must get back to normal, Rhona.”
Rhona Dow sighed and broke off another square of chocolate.
The all-night supermarket on the Bevham Road was not a place Jane would ever have thought of as a haven but when she pulled into the car park, and saw the multicoloured blaze of lights and bright hoardings, she felt a lifting of her spirits. Inside it was warm and cheerful. She pushed a trolley round, exchanging words with other shoppers, picking out foods she would not normally buy as well as the dull essentials, eking out her time there. As long as she was surrounded by the cheerful hum everything else receded into the background and did not trouble her.
After the checkout she went to the café. She was hungry, she realised, queuing for her coffee, and added a plate of bacon, eggs and toast to her tray. She also bought a newspaper.
Supermarkets were good refuges, good for the lonely, those with empty lives, those needing a break and some company of the sort which committed you to nothing more than a few words and the price of a cup of tea. People who said they were soulless and that small shops were always best had not felt as she had, and been restored, even temporarily, by the wide aisles and bright clatter and activity. You couldn’t linger in a small shop, taking advantage of warmth and company, for as long as you liked, and she had known plenty in London with brusque and unwelcoming staff.
God, she thought, the God I know, the God I believe in, the God of love and comfort, the God who sustains, is here as palpably tonight as in the Cathedral of St Michael.
The bacon and eggs were hot and surprisingly delicious, the local newspaper a carousel of gossip and titbits of information and the sort of photographs of amateur dramatic society productions, school sports and wedding pictures that delighted her.
As she was leaving the café a couple came up to talk, recognising her from the cathedral and wanting to ask about having all four of their children baptised together.
The streets were quiet as she drove back. The moon was a paring from a silver sixpence, over the Hill.
She slid her car up to the space on the cobbles beside the Precentor’s house, which was in darkness. Joseph’s car was back. She wondered how Rhona had got on with her dressmaking and how she managed to keep chocolate stains from the fabric. Now she had only to lug three carrier bags down through the garden to the bungalow, let herself in and put on all the lights to send any dark shadows and memories shrinking back into the walls.
The torch she kept on her keyring and which normally sent a thin, piercing beam some distance ahead was not working when she clicked the end, but she knew her way down the path by now. The bushes whispered as she caught against them, and out beyond the fruit trees she heard some creature scuttle away. In one of the gardens further along, a cat yowled, startling her. She edged her way up to the porch, touching a hand against the wall to help her get her bearings. Above her, the constellations of stars prickled against the sky. Key. It slid sweetly into the new lock. She pushed open the door. The house smelled of fear, her fear, the last time she had been inside it, trapped, held, caught claustrophobically inside with Max Jameson. She felt his arm round her throat and the chill edge of the knife blade and began to shiver. Her hand shook as she felt along the wall for the light switch and when the light came, for a second the place looked utterly strange, so that she was disorientated, half wondering if she had mistaken the house.
She went quickly round, turning on every light in kitchen, sitting room, study, bedroom, every lamp. She pulled her carrier bags of shopping inside, shut, locked and bolted the door, drew the kitchen blind and the curtains in each room. Only when she had done all of that did she take deep breaths to still herself. It was a while before her heart stopped thumping.
She made herself look about slowly. Everything was as it had been. Chairs, table, desk, pictures, television, books, all in their places, all familiar. There was the faintest smell of must. The garden house was damp in spite of the maintenance team’s best efforts.
She went to the window in the sitting room. Stopped dead, hearing something. Some scrape or scratch outside, a stone kicked, a brick dislodged?
Of course she could not sleep with the windows open.
It was after midnight. She unpacked her shopping and put it away, switched on the kettle, took out a mug and tin of chocolate powder, milk, a spoon. Set them on the table. The slightest noise, of tin on table, plug into socket, sounded uncanny, loud and hollow, and when it was over, the silence was total, a nervous, taut, unfriendly silence.
She took her hot drink resolutely into the study, and picked up her prayer book from the desk.
“O Lord, support us all the day long of this troublous life, Until the shades lengthen and the evening comes.”
She spent some time over prayer, the reading of the office and then of her Bible, so that it was well after one before she went to bed. But the silence had taken on a different quality, become a quietness, pleasing and soothing rather than an anxious silence. She read A.S. Byatt’s Possessionfor half an hour and then switched off the lamp. She felt a deep exhaustion that muffled her brain and made her limbs heavy. Sleep would come as a blessing.
