The Red House (10 page)

I see her, Dora, on the steps of Fiona’s white house. She’s not in the ambulance, not in one of the police cars, though an officer stands nearby. Her knees are drawn up, and she’s hugging them. I run right over. I want to scoop her up but stop short. She looks different: older, haunted, matured by trauma. Then she sucks snot back up her nose and wipes her eyes, ageing backwards towards being my baby again.

I crouch next to her on the step. ‘Are you hurt?’ I ask.

She shakes her head.

‘Good, good,’ I say, trying to keep it together.

Jesse licks Dora’s fingers. Dora pushes at her, so I shoo the dog off.

Chloe had told me that Dora had been in the barn, with one of her music tutors, called Maxwell Gant. Also that someone might be dead.
Not Dora
. That’s the only important thing. Dora’s not dead.

Chloe had given us a few minutes while she checked in
with the officers on scene. Now it’s time. She ambles over, huge now, her belly sticking out ahead of her. She heaves herself down on Dora’s other side. Her posture is friendly, but I know this is official. I keep my mouth shut.

‘Are you hurt?’ Chloe asks.

Dora shakes her head.

‘Did he touch you?’

Who?
I want to scream, but I squeeze my lips together.

‘No. I didn’t let him,’ Dora says. She tells how a man locked her in, and how she accidentally tripped an alarm. She tells how he came to get her and she hid, how she climbed into a loft and tipped an old fridge off the edge.

‘And …?’ Chloe prompts.

‘It hit him.’

Chloe nods. She looks over towards the barn door, where a stretcher is being brought out. It’s hard to see past the men tending it, but it appears that much of the body is covered. Maybe all of it. I raise my eyebrows, but Chloe ignores the obvious question on my face.

‘Did you know him?’ she asks Dora, forcing Dora’s eyes away from the procession to the ambulance.

Dora shakes her head. ‘He had a fluorescent yellow vest on. He’s the man who was driving the bulldozer.’ She points. The vehicle is alone in the dirt. The neighbouring houses are … gone, just gone.

‘Just one man? Working by himself?’ Chloe clarifies.

‘I think so. It was just him.’

‘What about your teacher? He was there, too,’ Chloe corrects.

I tense. Chloe shoots a glance at me that says, clearly, to not say anything, not move, not react.

‘He’s the
a cappella
tutor from orchestra week,’ Dora says. ‘He tried to help me.’

I try to picture the tutors and conductors from past summers, but
a cappella
is new this year. We’ve been letting Dora take the bus so we haven’t been around the concert hall. It’s a familiar place, the same as it’s been since I was a kid, playing the same summer music week decades ago. It’s a safe place. It’s always felt like a safe place.

‘Good. That’s helpful to know,’ Chloe says to Dora. ‘Did you come here together?’

I hold in my breath.

Dora says no.

Chloe keeps at it. ‘Did he follow you here? Does he treat you differently from the other girls?’

‘No!’ Dora says to everything. ‘Mr Gant helped me. You shouldn’t act like he did something wrong.’

‘This is your friend’s house. Was he here with her?’ Fiona goes to music week too. She plays harp. Dora plays flute. I don’t know if Fiona sings.

‘I – I don’t know.’

‘Do you know if they ever saw each other outside of school?’

‘It isn’t school. It’s music.’

‘That’s fine. Do you know if they ever saw each other outside of rehearsal?’ Chloe has this calm voice, as if she’s not upset, just interested. As if Dora doesn’t know what she’s after.

‘Mr Gant is engaged,’ Dora explains. ‘He has a fiancée.’

‘Really? How do you know that? Does he often talk about his personal life?’

‘No!’ Dora shouts, and Chloe and I both flinch. ‘No,
he’s a good teacher. He’s a good person. He helped me. Why are you trying to make me say something that isn’t true?’ Dora’s voice sounds like a howl. I hate letting Chloe do this to her.

‘How did you get this rip?’ Chloe says, pointing at her sleeve.

Dora shakes her head.

‘Was it when you were climbing up to the loft?’ Chloe suggests. I’m trying to picture it. I’ve never been in there. Dora’s been playing here for years, and neither Gwen nor I have ever been in that barn.

Dora blinks fast and rubs her eyes. ‘I didn’t recognise Mr Gant at first. I thought he was someone helping the bad man. So I tried to hurt him and he stopped me from hurting him.’

‘Stopped you how?’ I interject.

Chloe’s glare tells me plainly:
You’re not police any more. You’re not supposed to be talking.
I pinch my lips shut.

‘I tried to push him off the loft and he pushed back. He—’

Dora’s pause feels minutes long.

‘He stopped me from pushing him and then we recognised each other. That’s all,’ she finishes.

‘And that’s how your shirt got ripped?’ Chloe asks.

‘That’s how my
sleeve
got ripped,’ Dora says.

Sleeve
sounds less intimate than
shirt
. She’s protecting him.

‘What did he—’ I begin, but Chloe intercepts me.

‘You did a really good job,’ Chloe tells her. That’s how I talk to the dog. That’s how Chloe’s going to talk to her baby. Dora won’t like that.

‘He shouldn’t have handcuffs on,’ Dora says, indignant and bristling. ‘He didn’t hurt anyone.’

I follow her gaze. There’s a man with cuffs on standing with a uniformed officer. He looks humiliated, upset, and angry.
And young. And attractive
. I look at Dora’s face, looking at him.

‘Please?’ she says to Chloe.

‘Stay here,’ Chloe says. She pushes herself to standing. She talks to the officer with the man and the cuffs come off. Then that officer puts him in the back of a police car. Dora’s still watching him. The man turns his head quickly when their eyes catch. The car isn’t driven anywhere. They just keep him in it.

A text comes in on my phone. Gwen, at last. ‘Your mother’s on her way,’ I tell Dora.

That does Dora in. She cries, the noisy, hunching-up-your-shoulders kind of crying. I lay my hand on her back. The side I’m sitting on, that’s my bad hand. It just splays there on her.

‘Why were you here?’ I ask, when the heavy sobs turn into light panting.

She snuggles into me, squeezing her eyes tight. ‘I was worried about Fiona. She left early.’ Suddenly, she looks up. ‘Fiona left before we had our practice with Mr Gant, so he couldn’t have gone home with her! You have to tell that to Chloe. She left way before he did. We had practice without her.’

I nod and pat her arm. ‘I will. I’ll tell her.’

‘I don’t know where she is. Maybe she and her mum had an emergency? But they wouldn’t leave Rowena, would they? She can’t look after herself … Couldn’t, I
mean. She died, Dad. Fiona’s grandmother died.’

Dora’s shaking. I pull my arm up around her shoulder. My fingers can’t curl at the end to complete the hug, but the bend at the wrist is enough to pull her towards my chest.

Behind us, the front door slaps open. Fiona’s there, escorted by an officer. She looks dishevelled and disoriented, as if she’s just woken up, though who could sleep through all of this? One earbud is still stuck in, as a kind of answer to that question, and the other one dangles. Dora jumps up and hugs her. ‘I was worried about you!’ she says. ‘You weren’t home. Were you? Where were you?’ Fiona’s just staring at her. They both gradually calm down, breathing in sync.

Fiona says that she left early on the bus because she felt sick and she’s been sleeping. She says she had music on.

‘Are your parents home?’ I ask. Then I correct myself: ‘Is your mother home?’ Fiona doesn’t live with her father.

‘Mum’s not home,’ she says.

Dora tilts her head quizzically. I’m about to ask where Fiona’s mum is when the dog starts barking. I shout, ‘Jesse!’ She doesn’t stop, though. The yaps are sharp and persistent. I go after her. Dora follows us around the barn.

Jesse’s there. She’s got her nose in the blackberry bushes. She stops barking when I pick up her lead. She lies next to the bush and won’t budge, even when I pull and say ‘Up!’ I pull on Jesse again. She won’t come. I recognise her posture from a training years ago: she’s found something.
Don’t mince words; she’s found a body
. That’s what she’d been trained to do.

Chloe tells me to get Dora home,
now
. She phones for a larger forensic team and for lights. They’re going to have to work into the night.

I force Jesse up and bundle her in my arms. I dump her in the back of Chloe’s car. Dora follows, and flings herself into the back with Jesse, squeezing her while Jesse whines.

I wait in the front. A tap on the window startles me. I don’t know the man, but his ginger hair fits Chloe’s description of the ‘new boy’. His hands gesture and signal incoherently, so I open the door.

‘I’ve been told you take you home, sir.’ He has Chloe’s keys.

I slide over. He takes charge.

I try to recognise Cambridge but, unlike the college, the city centre stirs no memories.
A lot of it must be new
, I remind myself, and, honestly, it’s so crowded who can see anything? The pavement is busy with shoppers and families and tourists; I slip between a shopping trolley and a pushchair, and duck out of the way of someone’s photograph.
And, after all, I was only eight when I left.

I cover my mouth and blink, hit with one of those sudden pangs that’s become common since I’ve come back. ‘Left’ is such a benign word to describe what happened. I was eight when my parents died and my brothers and I were given to three different families.

I stop at the crosswalk, jostled by bored teenagers, waiting for the red man on the pedestrian light to turn green.

Maxwell’s grateful to me for facing Cambridge. He’s thanked me a thousand times. I am doing it for him, partly, but I need it for me, too. It’s time.

I step out into the road.

Even if Maxwell didn’t have the job offer, it’s important that we do this before getting married. It’s important for me that I do this. That Patrick Bell’s contacted me this week, of all weeks, well, it could be a coincidence, or it could be that returning here has triggered something, something in the universe that—

A purr of acceleration then a squeak of tyres against the road. The subsequent lack of impact feels shocking. I’m pinned by surprise. Counting by heartbeats it’s only a few seconds, but the time stretches and thins, like the skin of an expanding balloon. Then,
pop
, the driver hoots the horn at me, two sharp blasts, and I dash the rest of the way across the road.

Breathe, Imogen
. I turn around. From the side I can see that it’s not the same car, obviously not.
Just because it’s the same colour doesn’t make it the same thing
, I chide myself. I know that the paranoia springs from guilt. I should be able to tell Maxwell anything.
I can
, I remind myself. I choose not to, for his sake. That’s a good thing, not a weakness.

The restaurant is all alone on the edge of the green. On the map, this place is called Parker’s Piece and is crossed by two pathways making the shape of a big X, as if for treasure. That’s why I’d noticed it. That, and its proximity to a large P for parking, and the city centre bus station. I don’t know if Patrick Bell will come by car, or if he’ll come at all, but I needed to remove reasons to refuse.

A waitress looks up at me as I enter. None of the tables are occupied; it’s that restaurant lull well past lunch and not quite late enough for dinner. My ears adjust to the sudden quiet inside, the way that eyes become accustomed to dark,
and faint pop music coming from the kitchen gradually becomes intelligible.

I’m seated. I nestle my phone on the folded linen napkin by my bright white plate.

Maxwell is right. I can’t trust someone from just a few emails. So I told Patrick Bell that I can’t get to Highfields Caldecote this evening. Instead, I’ll be waiting here at Mai Thai. I’ll buy dinner, I wrote, hoping that that sounded light and cheerful. Not suspicious. Not clingy. It’s not strange for a woman to prefer to meet in a public place; he shouldn’t be surprised, or offended.
He won’t cancel. Will he? I don’t think he’ll back out. Not if he really is
…

‘I’ll have the vegetable satay, please. And a coffee,’ I say. I can stretch that out, make it last. I’ll order an entrée later. It’s early; it’s not like I’m making anyone else wait for the table. ‘No, wait!’ I wave my hand as the waitress reaches to take away the place setting across from me. ‘I’m waiting for someone,’ I explain.

Out across the grass, there’s a decorative lamppost in the centre of the green, and volleyball and Frisbee players packing up. Tanning girls will have left hours ago. I was supposed to meet Patrick Bell in Highfields Caldecote in fifteen minutes.
Has he got my email? What if he hasn’t and waits for me there? He won’t know the house. Maybe I wouldn’t either. It’s been a long time. What if they’ve repainted? New windows, additions, people do all sorts of things
…

‘Yes, thank you,’ I say. The waitress places a dish in front of me, and the heat and smell waft up into my face. I wrap my hands around the coffee cup, searing my palms.
I deserve that.

The phone rings. Coffee rolls over the lip of the cup. On the screen:
Max
.

No.

I can’t face him until I know whether Patrick Bell is really who he claims to be. I press the button to refuse the call.

What if Maxwell’s right? What if Patrick is just some scammer? He doesn’t even have to be a scammer. What if this is just a joke?

Finding Robert and Ben when I turned eighteen had been simple, and in the end we’d even recognised one another. They had been eleven when adopted, and kept together because they’re twins; I had been eight. We’d all grown taller since then, and Ben had grown a beard, but we’d been still visibly ourselves. Sebastian would be different. He’d been only three, still pouch-cheeked and baby-cute, when we were separated. Even if this Patrick Bell is our lost brother, he isn’t ‘Sebastian’, not any more, and hasn’t been for most of his life.

For all that I’ve fantasised about this meeting, it has never been literal in my mind. He’s never been an unrecognisable grown man in my imagination; instead he runs into my arms and I scoop him up into a snuggle, his curly hair tickling my nose. I’ve always, from the day he was born, felt like a mother to him.

There’s so much that I want to tell him. Mum had let me come with her to hear his heartbeat for the first time. It had been magical, that swishing sound that heartbeats make in utero, so different from the thump that comes through stethoscopes. I had tried to describe it to my brothers afterwards, but my attempts sounded like the
shew, shew
sound you make to pretend lasers are firing out of a plastic blaster. Mum and I had caught eyes, the boys tussling between us. Only we, mother and daughter, had understood.

Only when I was older did I realise what Mum had been through. She’d been trying for a fourth baby for years, for my whole childhood, really. The cryptic marks on the wall calendar, the times Mum and Dad scheduled ‘special dates’ and we all went to bed early; the times Mum cried in the bathroom … Now I understand. I feel it myself. It feels urgent, aiming to have a first at the age my mother had had her last. I wonder if Maxwell and I will have a difficult time. I wonder if I’ll cry in the bathroom once a month when we start trying.

Maybe I should call him back
. I lift up the phone.

The waitress’ face leans in front of mine. ‘Miss? Is this your date?’

I freeze. I feel suddenly haggard, and panicked, and worry that my eyes are wild.

A man steps out from behind the waitress, wearing a casual suit and looking nervous. His hair isn’t curly, but it’s cut too short to tell, really. He’s not as tall as Dad was, but what about Mum’s side of the family? My heart is thudding.
How will I know? How can I tell? What if he’s lying to me? What if he’s not lying?

‘Sophie?’ he asks.

‘No, I – Patrick?’ I stammer.

He laughs and ducks his head. ‘You’re waiting for a blind date, too?’

I wriggle my ring finger automatically. ‘Engaged,’ I say. ‘But, I am waiting for someone. Sorry, I thought you were …’

‘You didn’t look happy to see me,’ he says. ‘I mean, him.’ He’s smiling, and affable. I wonder, briefly, if he
is
Patrick, testing me.

No, ridiculous
. I shake my head. ‘Would you like to join me?’ I ask, ‘while we both wait?’ The need to chatter, to distract from the memories and theories and panic, has made me bold.

He seems surprised, stunned even. ‘Really? I—’ He sits across from me and flaps the napkin into his lap. ‘I just assumed, I assumed that you really were Sophie and trying to get out of it.’ He’s good-looking but clearly nervous.

‘You won’t get anywhere putting yourself down like that,’ I tell him. ‘Maybe seeing us together will make her jealous. That could work in your favour.’

He’s staring down at his empty plate. ‘Any woman would be jealous of you. Your fiancé’s a lucky man.’ Just his eyes tilt upwards to my face, gauging my reaction through thick lashes.

‘Not available,’ I reiterate, wagging my ring finger again.

‘Sorry,’ he says, and lifts a menu up to cover his red face.

I ask for a glass of water. I feel too warm.

‘Are you all right?’ the man asks me. He’s touching my hand.
Patrick? Not Patrick.

‘What’s your name?’ I ask in return.

Sebastian
, I hear, and shake my head, hard.

‘Simon,’ he repeats, and I laugh, because of course he isn’t Sebastian. I’m hearing what I expect to hear, not what is.

Unless he’s lying,
I think
. Maybe he did say Sebastian the first time.

‘Simon, look, I think you should wait for your date at
another table.’ I don’t explain. I learnt long ago to not give men a reason; they’ll just try to argue it away.

‘Of course. Sorry,’ he says, and gets up in such a way that he tilts in a little bow towards me.

‘You’re very sweet, Simon. Sophie will be glad to meet you,’ I assure him. All those S names. No wonder I’d heard ‘Sebastian.’

He sits alone with his back to me and Sophie doesn’t come, not as long as I’m there. No one comes to my table either, or emails to decline. The waitress asks everyone who comes in, even in couples or groups, if they’re meeting someone. She’s motherly. She doesn’t want us to be alone.

What if Sebastian does come?
I twist my hands in my lap, anxious, like when Maxwell and I had Skyped with his mother to announce our engagement. It had been my idea to add video. I’d worn a string of lapis beads bought from a museum’s gift shop, and a conservatively buttoned blouse. I’d wanted to impress, desperately. It had been a shock to see that Maxwell’s mother had put in the same effort, like looking into a mirror, but one that reflects intentions, not results. She’d appeared to have tried applying make-up after years of not bothering. She’d worn her hair down, in a way that had probably looked nice when she was young, but didn’t fit with her now-loose cheeks and her thick eyelids. I’d realised in that instant that we were both equally fragile, hopeful, and jealous.

Thinking of Sebastian now, I remind myself,
He’s probably as nervous to meet me as I am to meet him.

Sebastian had been born at night, in our parents’ bed. My own hospital birth had involved conflict with the attending doctor, which Mum told like recounting a battle, and the
forced administration of drugs, which Mum told like a horror film. With Seb, Mum had got the birth she wanted.

I remember coming down to breakfast. Sun had shone through the kitchen windows. Mum was at the dining table, in her dressing gown with her hair loose. Dad was scrambling eggs. Toast popped up – that springy sound so metallic that it almost rings – and Mum lifted her head. She smiled at me, and the baby cried. That’s the first I’d noticed him, snuggled in Mum’s lap with his head lolling on the inside of her elbow. Mum slid her dressing gown open and he found her breast and suckled. Mum was naked underneath, not even a nightgown, and I hesitated to get the boys. Dad nudged me, and put a plate of toast and eggs under my nose. He led me to the table and pulled the side of Mum’s robe over her other breast. He went upstairs to tell the boys and get them up for school. Later, I got to feed Seb from a bottle, I remember that clearly, but the first day Mum had fed him from her own body. I pretended to feed my dolls like that for years. Once, I even tried to feed Seb, but Mum shook her head and closed my shirt. Ten years later, the first time a boy licked my breasts, I saw bright light and almost passed out.

The phone rings again. The screen says ‘Max’ again. I snatch it up this time, anxious and emotional, and as if to prove to the restaurant, now full, that I haven’t been stood up:
Here he is, calling.

‘Max!’ I say, loudly. The waitress seems visibly relieved.

‘Imogen,’ he says. ‘Thank God.’

‘What’s going on? Where are you?’

He says he’s calling from a police station. ‘Can you come? Where are
you?
I need you to explain to the police that you grew up here, that you grew up in Highfields Caldecote.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Heads are turning. Simon has swivelled his body around. I’m too loud. I lower my voice: ‘Why do they want to know that?’

‘Did you meet him? I should have gone with you. I was worried about you. I should have offered to drive. I need you to explain to them why I was there.’

‘You were in Highfields Caldecote? What happened? Why are you with the police?’

I wish I hadn’t said that out loud. Conversation has stopped at the tables near me.

‘I helped a girl who was in danger and she turned out to be one of the teenagers from my music group. I’m all right, and so is she, but now the police want to know …’

I could finish the sentence just fine: They want to know that he hadn’t been inappropriate with her. They want to know that he had a truly coincidental reason to be wherever they’d found him.

I wait for the buzz of conversation to resume, for people to chew and swallow and get back to making their own noise, but they don’t. They wait for me.

I can’t leave him hanging any longer. I have to say something. I choose one word: ‘
Again?
’

It turns out that the Cambridge police station is just across the green. An officer from there drives me to the station in Cambourne, where Maxwell is. I gaze out the car window, waiting for the journey towards my childhood home to become familiar. It never does.