A Place of Safety (10 page)

‘No, thanks.’

‘OK.’ Nicky dragged over the spare chair and sat down, facing the desk. ‘I asked David about the fight on the way to school this morning. And I think you’re worrying unnecessarily. Stephen’s
back in school and very proud of his stitches. The only thing scaring David now is that you might be so cross with him for getting a detention that you’ll let George persuade you to send him to boarding school.’

‘Oh, shit! I didn’t think he knew anything about that.’

‘David knows everything,’ Nicky said, sounding as though she pitied Trish for her delusions. ‘Haven’t you got on to that yet? He’s incredibly bright anyway, but he also watches everyone all the time, and listens to everything that’s said. He knows all about you and George and what George thinks about him living here.’

Trish frowned, trying to remember the worst things George had said about him. There wasn’t anything she could do about that.

‘But I will find a way to make him see that I’ll never send him away,’ she said aloud.

‘That would help. It’s his biggest nightmare. Far worse than the body in the river.’

‘OK. By the way, Nicky, have you ever heard him mention a boy called Mer Fullwell?’

‘Often. David thinks he’s awful.’

‘Why?’

‘He hasn’t said. D’you want me to ask?’

‘Only if it crops up easily. I don’t want him worried by questions.’

‘I’ll be careful.’

Trish blew Nicky a kiss. ‘I couldn’t do it without you, you know.’

‘Good. I love it here,’ she said with even more warmth than usual. ‘And I love David. He’s the nicest boy I’ve ever looked after. Now shouldn’t you be in chambers?’

‘Slave-driver,’ Trish said. The insult made her think of Buxford and the questions she had rehearsed with such care. ‘I’ve got one phone call to make before I leave.’

When Nicky had gone down the spiral stairs to sort out the mess in David’s room, Trish rang Buxford’s office, only to hear his secretary saying that he would be out of the office until Thursday. He’d given Trish his home number, too, although not a mobile, so she tried him there.

‘I’m afraid he’s away today,’ said a smooth female voice that sounded old enough to be his wife’s. ‘But he’ll be back at the weekend. Can I give him a message?’

‘Could you say that Trish Maguire called? I need to talk to him. He’s got all my numbers.’

‘I’ll make sure he gets the message. Goodbye.’

Saturday was rugby day. The alarm brought Trish out of a tangle of duvet, gasping for breath. Choking, she grabbed a Kleenex from the box by her bed and blew her nose. She hated colds for the way they slowed down her brain. This one must have been incubating inside her all week.

‘You OK?’ George pushed himself up the bed.

‘Sorry to make such a noise,’ Trish said, blowing again and blinking to clear her sore eyes. ‘What a way to wake you up! I seem to have a cold. I hope you don’t get it.’

‘I don’t usually. But you’d better stay in bed today.’

‘No, I must get up. It’s rugby. David needs breakfast first.’

George flopped back against the pillows. ‘Why did we decide to give Nicky Saturdays off? Remind me.’

Trish laughed through the ache in her head and the blockage in her nose. ‘Because it gives us the chance to have Sundays in Fulham on our own. Maybe not this weekend, though. The least I can do is leave your house free of germs.’ She put one long bare leg out of bed. ‘Thank heavens for central heating.’

‘No, I meant it, Trish. Don’t get up. I’ll take him to rugby today.’ George was already on his feet and wrapping his scarlet towelling dressing gown round himself. ‘I’ll bring you breakfast in bed. LemSip or coffee? Or both?’

‘Oh, both, please. You are a saint.’

‘I know. I won’t kiss you because you’re disgusting when you have a cold.’

‘Such charm, George! You will be gentle with him on the way to rugby, won’t you? You know he’s having a rough time at school.’

‘What d’you think I’m going to do? Torture him?’ he said from the door. ‘I only told the boy not to play with his food.’

That was a mistake, Trish told herself as she listened to him thump down the spiral staircase to call David.

Nearly an hour later, when they’d gone, she had a bath instead of taking her usual quick morning shower. She usually avoided the waste of time involved in lolling in hot water, but this morning it was comforting. She leaned back, enjoying the coolness of the enamel against her neck and the steam sorting out her nose.

The whole process had such a good effect that there seemed no point going back to bed. She filtered some more coffee and took it to her desk, wondering whether Buxford would ring today. She couldn’t keep the lines free just on the off chance, so she picked up the phone to make her usual Saturday morning call to her mother.

‘How’s Bernard?’ Trish asked, after they’d swapped the week’s news.

‘Fine, apart from the sciatica, which makes him rather bad tempered.’

‘Poor you,’ Trish said with real sympathy as she thought of George’s recent bouts of irritability.

‘Bernard’s the sufferer, Trish,’ Meg said firmly. ‘Not me. Now, how’s your brother?’

‘Oh, OK. Does the sciatica mean—?’

‘Trish.’ Meg’s voice was even more firm. ‘I know you don’t think I should be burdened with your anxieties about him, but your father and I had been divorced for decades by the time he had his affair with David’s mother. And even if we hadn’t been,
it’s not the child’s fault. He’s the most important thing in your life at the moment. Don’t shut me out of that.’

Throughout Trish’s childhood, Meg had always done everything she could to counteract the way Paddy had deserted them soon after Trish’s eighth birthday. It seemed amazingly generous of her to go on trying to make everything right, even now that her daughter was an adult and definitely ought to have been able to cope on her own.

‘Come on,’ Meg said. ‘What’s up? Tell me.’

So Trish gave her a full account of the body in the river and David’s playground fight, got the usual dose of warm common sense in return and felt a lot better for it.

‘And don’t push him to talk,’ Meg added at the end. ‘If he’s anything like you were, that’ll make him even more stubbornly silent. You were always the original clam whenever there was something I particularly wanted to know.’

Trish laughed, remembering her efforts to keep her worst misdemeanours to herself. ‘Now, when am I going to see you?’

When they had eventually said goodbye, she dialled her father’s number. He wasn’t there, but his answering machine invited her to leave a message. Fighting the fury that would make him even less likely to pick up any of his responsibilities, she tried to make her voice sound reasonably friendly.

‘Paddy?’ she said. ‘Trish here. It seems ages since we met, and I miss you. What about coming round here for a drink sometime? Or dinner, maybe? David and I need to see you soon. Let me know. ’Bye.’

It was ironic that she now had to be the suitor in their relationship. Was Paddy taking revenge for the years when she’d refused all his overtures? Or was it just that he still couldn’t handle the fact that he had a son he had never seen, by a woman he’d left even before he knew she was pregnant and who was now dead?

Whatever it is, Trish thought, he’ll have to get over it.

She poured herself more coffee to sharpen her mind in case Buxford called, but she couldn’t think what to do while she waited.
The Times
was spread all over one of the black sofas, showing plenty of signs of George’s touch. For someone who was so neat in the kitchen, he was extraordinarily heavy-handed with newspapers. Every page was crumpled and out of line with the rest. But he’d finished both the cryptic and the baby crosswords, in spite of everything he’d done for her and David. She couldn’t have done that in the time.

An impending sneeze made her dive for the box of tissues at the far end of the sofa. When she emerged from the bundle of paper, she caught sight of her face reflected in the mirror over the fireplace. She looked terrible, like a sodden, red-eyed witch. If she didn’t get out of the flat soon, she would drown in a trough of self-pity.

She looked at the clock. There was plenty of time to go back to the Gregory Bequest and have another go at Toby Fullwell before the end of the morning’s rugby.

On her way out, she saw a bundle of post on the doormat and riffled through it. There was a postcard from Emma Gnatche, an old friend now working in the States. Beneath that were a couple of expected bills, and three charity appeals. Nothing that couldn’t wait. She dumped the pile on her desk and went out.

 

Toby opened the door to the gallery himself this time. He did not look welcoming and obviously had no idea who she was.

‘I came here last Tuesday morning,’ Trish said, holding out the torn ticket she had bought then. ‘Do you remember? I had a work emergency and had to leave. You told me I could come back to see the rest of the pictures without buying another ticket.’

‘Of course.’ He produced a smile that made the skin of his face twitch and flicker like a horse getting rid of flies. ‘Come on in. What would you like to see?’

‘You said something about a French room, I think,’ Trish said, wondering how soon she could get on to the subject of the five million pounds and whether it was really such a good idea to broach it on a day when her mind was sluggish. ‘I’d love to see that. The original collector was French, wasn’t he? So French pictures must have been particularly special to him.’

 

Helen looked down at the little package in its flowered paper, then up again at Jean-Pierre.

‘I don’t need a present,’ she said. ‘All I’ve ever wanted was to know you’re safe.’

‘But I need to give you one,
ma mie,’
he answered, tracing the line of her lips with one soft-tipped finger. ‘I cannot give you a ring yet, so it had to be something else, and something small enough for you to keep safe while you are here. This seemed best. Are you not going to open it?’

She untied the knotted ribbon that held the paper together and parted the flaps to reveal a flat gold oval about two inches by one and a half.

‘What is it?’

‘Turn it over, Helene.’ His voice, gentler and more seductive than ever, made her eyes blur again.

She had never expected love to make her so weepy. In the old days she had despised girls who cried all the time, girls like her stupid sister, whose latest letter had been even more self-pitying than usual. She sniffed.

‘Don’t cry,
ma mie,’
Jean-Pierre said, taking out his own handkerchief to wipe her eyes. ‘There is no need. All will be well. Look at it properly.’

She turned the gold oval over and saw a frame set with clear stones that could have been diamonds, which worried her dreadfully. They surrounded a tiny portrait of a dark-haired man, who looked so like Jean-Pierre that after a moment she could think of nothing else. Both had the same dark eyes and
beautiful tender mouths, but the painted man wore his hair long and had a large pearl hanging from his ear.

‘Is it you?’ she asked, delight at last pushing aside all her fears. ‘In fancy dress?’

He laughed. ‘No. It was painted about three hundred years before I was born, by your English Nicholas Hilliard. But I have always thought it looked like me, which is why I chose it for you.’

‘Then it’s much too valuable,’ she said, holding it out, balanced on her outstretched palm like a sugar lump for a carriage horse. ‘I can’t take it, Jean-Pierre.’

‘But you must. I want you to have something that is
very
valuable to me.’ He put one hand under her outstretched wrist and laid his lips over the fluttering blue veins. Then he kissed her properly.

‘It was one of the first paintings I acquired,’ he said, folding her fingers over the miniature, ‘and so I wanted it to be the first one I gave to you. I thought you could wear it on this chain, under your bodice. No one else will know, but you will feel it all the time against your skin, and think of me, and know that I will always return.’

More tears swelled in her eyes and she felt them dripping down on to her cheeks, but she smiled too, even though she couldn’t speak.

‘Ah,
ma mie,’
he said, gathering her into his arms. ‘Don’t be so sad. We will be together properly one day. I promise you.’

‘You can’t,’ she said, her words muffled against his chest. ‘No one can promise anything any more.’

The guns crashed in the distance. And nearby a man shrieked in agony.

 

Trish learned nothing useful from Toby Fullwell, except that he was not prepared to talk about buying or selling paintings or exactly what he had found in Jean-Pierre’s packages.

Each time she asked a direct question, he either pretended he hadn’t heard it, or chattered on about painters’ techniques regardless. It happened too often to be coincidence. She heard a lot more than she wanted to know about brush strokes and composition, and the way painters built up different sorts of glazes to achieve the light effects they needed. But she saw no sign of fear.

All she took away with her in the end was confirmation that Buxford hadn’t imagined everything, even if he had exaggerated Toby’s terror. The man definitely had something to hide, but Trish still had no idea what it could be.

Leaving the building, she wondered whether it might have had something to do with Jean-Pierre himself. At first she had accepted the story that his huge collection had been forgotten. Now that seemed incredible. Why hadn’t anyone asked what had happened to his paintings? She decided to go to her favourite library in St James’s Square in search of information about him.

There she discovered that none of the three types of catalogue – the old bound ledgers, card index or the computer – turned up a single reference to Jean-Pierre or his paintings. Nor did any of the directories or reference books in the reading room.

Not prepared to go away without anything, she scooped up a random selection of general accounts of the art market, and some memoirs of the First World War. Even if they didn’t help her learn more about the origins of the Gregory Bequest collection, she thought, they might come in handy for David’s project, so they wouldn’t be wasted.

All the cabs seemed to have disappeared when she re-emerged from the library, which meant she had to walk up St James’s to Green Park tube. The books didn’t seem very heavy at first, but they began to weigh her down as she waited on the platform. When the Jubilee Line train eventually arrived, it was stuffed with people and luggage, and she had to stand all the way to her stop, in a crowd of tourists on an outing to Tate Modern. By the
time she was riding the escalator up through the magnificently soaring concrete halls of Southwark Station, her arms were aching so much that she had to keep shifting the pile of books, like a baby, from arm to arm. The walk back to her flat seemed much harder than usual.

‘Come on, Trish,’ said George’s voice from behind her, as she reached her own street. She felt his arm around her shoulders and leaned back for the comfort. ‘Why on earth didn’t you stay in bed?’

‘I was too restless,’ she said, turning to smile at him. Then her voice sharpened: ‘Where’s David?’

‘Having a pizza with a friend and his parents. They’ll bring him back by seven.’ He was hustling her up the iron stairs. ‘Which will give us both peace and quiet and you time to rest properly.’

Trish opened the door and silenced the alarm. ‘It’s only a cold, George. I’m not ill.’

‘I know. But it’s a sign that you’re run down. You’ve spent the last year dashing about looking after everyone else and working far too hard. Go and lie on the sofa and let someone else look after you for once.’

That was pretty rich, she thought as she kicked off her shoes. George was always telling her what she ought to do for her own good. But he was right, irritatingly enough. As soon as she lay back on one of the two big black sofas in front of the fireplace, blood drummed in her ears and she felt as though bullets were ricocheting around the inside of her head.

 

Toby had made himself a cheese sandwich, but he couldn’t eat it. He longed for Margaret to phone so that he could be sure she and the boys had got away safely. Now that it was far, far too late, he realized how easily Ben could have picked them up as they left the house.