Down Cemetery Road (5 page)

All of which mattered more than two deaths and one small child. But it was happening in other time zones, whereas this was a short distance away. She locked the car, and went in to Reception.

Where she found a lone harassed woman dealing with three telephones and a short queue. The latter dissipated after a while; the telephones remained substantial and in full working order, and it was against their clamour that Sarah made her request: to see, talk to, Dinah Singleton. A child. No, she did not know which ward, though the children’s would be a good guess. Yes, this was the little girl who had been brought in after an explosion.

‘Are you a relative?’

‘A neighbour,’ she said. ‘A friend,’ she added.

‘You’re not press, are you?’

‘Do I look like press?’

The woman didn’t appear to want to comment.

‘I’m not press,’ Sarah said firmly.

‘You’d better take a seat. I’ll see if there’s someone can talk to you.’

So Sarah took a seat, while no obvious effort was made to find someone, anyone, to talk to her.

There were posters on the walls: the dangers of smoking, of drinking, of taking drugs, of making love. In a student town, it was a pretty forlorn hope that anyone was paying attention. She remembered a piece of graffiti she’d once seen or read about: a picture of a newborn baby, with the legend
The first three minutes of life can be the most dangerous
. Under this had been added
The last three can be pretty dodgy too
. The girl she was here to see, Dinah Singleton, could grow old and die without ever being in so much danger again. She could smoke, drink, shoot up, screw round; she could take up lion taming. And all through her life she’d know, when she was tiny, she’d slept through an explosion, and would never be in so much danger again. There was no need to mention miracles: you could talk about wardrobes, and the random order in which things happened. And what you could take away from such an event, if you happened to be the one who lived through it, was a belief that your life had been weatherproofed, stress-tested, and the ordinary dangers, the ones the posters warned you about, no longer applied. At the very least, you might think yourself bombproof. Nobody outside a war zone was surely called upon to survive explosions twice.

This, then, was the link. This was why she was here. It was not just the vision of the blonde child in yellow jellies, but the secret sharing of the gift of survival: Dinah, like Sarah, had come through the fire, and while the circumstances could not have been more different, the simple fact of it shone like a talisman. And because this was so, she needed to track the story to its conclusion. She needed to know that Dinah had not just survived, but would continue to do so. She wanted to know her condition.

So, anyway, Sarah told herself while she waited; wondered, too, why she had not told Mark she was doing this. Probably because to have done so would have been giving him ammunition. Any weakening on the question of children, he’d jump on in an instant. Which was maybe why she’d given her maiden name at Reception. This was not her usual habit.

After a while somebody came: a small, fiftyish woman who evidently wore the rulebook like a whalebone corset. Possibly she was a robot in a white smock. ‘Ms Tucker?’

‘I’m looking for –’

‘You can’t see her.’

There was such a high-definition quality to this, Sarah hardly knew how to respond. ‘Why not?’

‘It’s completely irregular.’ She spoke impatiently, as if she’d exhausted this subject more than once. ‘This is a hospital. You simply cannot wander in and be given free rein.’

Deep breath. ‘When would it be possible to see her?’

‘I can’t answer that.’

‘It’s a simple enough question. When are visiting hours?’

‘I cannot allow –’

Sarah turned and walked away, while behind her the robot choked to a halt. At Reception, Sarah asked the young woman when visiting hours were.

‘Mondays to Fri –’

‘I’ll deal with this, Dawn,’ the robot said. ‘Ms Tucker, I’ll have to ask you to leave.’

‘This is ridiculous.’

‘You are interfering with the smooth –’

‘I’m interfering with nothing. I’m concerned about a child. That is all.’

‘Are you a relative?’

‘No, but –’

‘Then there is nothing more to be said.’

‘I don’t agree.’

The robot’s mouth twitched once. Twice. Somewhere deep behind her eyes lurked an unassuaged affront.

‘Just tell me this. Is she all right?’

‘I have no information on the patient.’

‘What do you mean you’ve no –’

‘I have no information on the patient.’

Sarah’s anger tipped into fear. All around, walls pulsed with the consequences of emergency. How could one small child survive the damage by the river? Wardrobe or no wardrobe. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’

‘I have no –’ said the robot. Then she stopped.

‘You know which child this is, don’t you? There was an explosion.’

The mouth twitched again.

‘It’s a police matter. Shall we call the police? Do you want the police here instead of me?’

‘You’ll have to leave now. Or I shall call security.’

‘If I go without seeing her,’ Sarah said, ‘
I’m
calling the police.’

‘That won’t help you.’

‘Why not?’

A wrestling match took place in the robot’s head: Sarah watched the coverage broadcast live on the robot’s face. The disinclination to give out information versus dealing the clinching blow to Sarah’s wants. The blow won.

‘The patient,’ she said, ‘is no longer in the hospital.’

The patient was no longer in the hospital. What did that mean: she’d been transferred, discharged, what? Abducted by aliens? ‘Are you actually in charge?’ Sarah asked. ‘I mean, who else can I speak to about this?’

The robot’s eyes narrowed to slits, the kind you find on coastal defence bunkers. The ones they fire cannons through. ‘
I am in charge
,’ she hissed. ‘Any enquiries you have will be dealt with by
me
.’

Sarah did not wait to hear it but turned and walked smartly out the front door, the best she could manage on the way being a wink at Dawn on Reception, pressganging the poor woman into an alliance against her horrible boss. Who was probably herself a harassed, overworked woman but there’d be time for rational sympathy later. At that moment, Sarah hoped the robot would soon step into a malfunctioning lift.

Out in the fresh air, she took a deep breath. It had been years since she’d smoked, but at times like this, of which there were thankfully few, she tended to monitor her stress receptors, putting that old chestnut about there being no such thing as an ex-smoker to the test. Everything seemed normal. No outraged nicotine centre screaming its shredded lungs out. She expelled air carefully, relieved that tobacco slavery was a thing of the past, and headed for the car.

Where a man leant against her driver’s door: long-haired, bearded; wearing shades today, but she recognized him. Anywhere but here and now – broad daylight, people, a
hospital
– she’d have screamed. You read about this: women finding strangers by their cars, wielding sob stories, looking for lifts. Afterwards, you’d know they had tools in their bags: saws and pliers, cutting knives. Never trust anybody you meet on the street. If Sarah had children, that would be lesson one. Never trust anybody you meet. But this man carried no bag, and his hands hung loosely by his sides, palms out, as if he were aware of the dangers flashing through her mind, and wanted them out of the way. He spoke first.

‘Who are you?’

Bloody cheek.

‘You were on the bridge, with the other women. Now you’re here. What do you want?’

‘I want my car,’ Sarah said. She had her keys in hand, prepared to throw them in his face. Or slash out; leave railway tracks down his bloody cheek.

‘I don’t mean to scare you. But you’re here for Dinah, aren’t you? Where is she?’

‘I want my car,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘Would you get out of the way?’

He didn’t move. ‘Are you a social worker?’

‘Fuck off!’ She moved round and opened the passenger door. He didn’t try to stop her. But he watched through the windscreen as she squeezed into the driving seat, and she wished she’d worn a longer skirt. She wound the window down. ‘And who are
you
?’

‘They’re friends of mine,’ he said.

‘The Singletons?’

‘All of them.’

‘There were only two,’ she said stupidly. Then he turned and walked off, his ponytail bouncing against his neck as he went. He didn’t look back. Whatever he’d wanted, she didn’t have.

Sarah’s hands were shaking, even once she’d taken a grip on the steering wheel. She felt, now it was over, that she’d spent the past five minutes being beaten up.
The patient is no longer in the hospital
. Where the patient was was no business of Sarah’s. But it could not be right, this humourless rejection of a simple enquiry; nor did she enjoy being lurked for in car parks, when all she wanted was to ascertain the fate of one orphaned child. A spurt of anger fuelled her into action, and she twisted the ignition key harshly. There were other uniforms, she thought, than the white one the robot wore. Not a natural-born police enthusiast, she at least recognized when matters fell within their jurisdiction. And as she reversed from her parking space the statue in the fountain stirred in the back of her mind, as if it could tell her a thing or two about survival, about resurrection; about how they did not always end in the happy ever after.

IV

The agency was sandwiched between a pub and a newsagent’s, and while the advert in Yellow Pages specified hi-tech, the reality did not run to a working doorbell. After pressing twice Sarah tried the door, which opened on a staircase leading up to a small landing, where a framed print of dreaming spires hung next to another door. The legend read
Oxford Investigations
, and below that, in upper case,
Joseph Silvermann BA
. She tapped on the glass. Maybe Joseph Silvermann BA was hard of hearing. When she pushed it, this door opened too – hard of hearing and short on locks – and Sarah found herself in what looked like a secretary’s room: a desk with a phone and intercom and electric console, and a couple of plastic chairs lined against the wall. A coat rack stood next to a closed connecting door, and more dreaming spires, taken from a different angle, brightened the wall. Through the door came voices, mostly a woman’s. It did not sound pleased. A male kept attempting a counterpoint, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying: it was just a bass stutter, poking through the gaps in the harangue.

‘– just try growing up, even. I mean Jesus Christ, you’re old enough. Or is that too much to ask?’

‘— — —’

‘Oh fuck off, Joe.’

Leaving suggested itself as a bright next move. The last thing she needed was a homegrown version of
Moonlighting
, especially after her brush-off from the regular cops. The police station was opposite the Crown and County Courts, a proximity helping foster the illusion that the law was efficient, travelled in short straight lines, and knew exactly where it was headed. There was a busy road to cross between the two, though, and maybe this accounted for the casualties along the way. Certainly Sarah’s experience suggested that justice was not so much abstract as unobtainable given the materials at hand, chief among these being the bored, or possibly stupid, desk sergeant who had taken the details she offered him and proceeded to put them together in a bewildering variety of ways, their common thread being his inability to come anywhere near the truth.

‘So it was your house that exploded, then.’

‘No. I live in the same street, that’s all.’

‘But your daughter was in the house.’

‘She’s not my daughter.’

Three-quarters of an hour of this, and she’d been transferred to a detective, or at any rate somebody without a uniform. Maybe one of the cleaning staff. But he had at least seemed aware of the existence of the Singletons, the fact that an explosion had occurred, and that the police were nominally looking into it. What he didn’t seem too keen on was complicating this knowledge with further details. He listened to Sarah’s story with barely suppressed boredom before the brush-off proper commenced.

‘If the child is no longer in the hospital, we have to assume that she was discharged.’

Brilliant. ‘Into whose care?’

‘You’d have to speak to Social Services about that.’

‘I’ve tried. Nobody seems to know.’

He sighed. ‘Ms Tucker, they’re hardly likely to have let her wander off on her own. If she’s not there any more, it’s because she’s been taken somewhere else. And if they won’t tell you where, it’s because they don’t regard it as any of your business.’

Which was as close as he came to saying he didn’t either, but near enough for there to be no mistake. Sarah could just see him opening a mental file on her, labelling it Nosy Neighbour, and shutting it again. So she kept pestering him long enough to be an actual nuisance, rather than merely irritating, then left abruptly when his phone started ringing.

And now she was in North Oxford, in the lobby of a private detective agency picked from the phone book, and the impulse that had carried her this far was waning now she’d arrived. What, she asked herself again, was Dinah Singleton to her? The ghost of a child, a walking shadow; not even an actual absence in Sarah’s life, just the possibility of one. An invisible girl with whom she shared a knack for survival. What mattered was that she hadn’t slept last night for wondering about the girl; not all of her sleeplessness arising from a disinterested concern for the child’s welfare. A good part of it was consuming curiosity.

‘– last time, Joe, I mean it.’

‘— — —’

‘Yeah. I’ve heard it all before.’

The door opened and Sarah jumped. The woman that came through was taller than her, and older, with the kind of naturally curly hair that must have been a wow at eighteen but could get to be a nuisance in later life, when people thought you wore it like that to look younger. It was dark, very nearly black, and cropped so it fitted the woman’s head like a cap one size too small. Her face was laughter-lined around the eyes and mouth, but she wasn’t laughing now. Nor was she expecting company. She started when she registered Sarah, though recovered quickly. Her eyes, like her hair, were almost black, and looked properly sardonic when she spoke. ‘Well well well. A customer.’