A Game For All The Family (40 page)

“But what will you do when you get there?” Alex asks. “What’s the point of this trip?”

“No time to tell you.”

Or to work it out myself.

I grab my bag, phone, and car keys and pull on a coat over my pajamas. In the hall, I slide my feet into what’s left of my puppy-chewed flip-flops and I’m on my way, with Alex’s question ringing in my ears.

What will I do when I get there? I’m about to find out. If I can just get there before Anne does . . .

In the car, I’m disciplined. Can’t look at the clock on the dashboard or I’ll worry about time, make frantic calculations, measure each second as it knocks itself out of the race. That’ll take my concentration away from driving as fast as I can. I keep my foot pressed down on the gas.

If I meet another car coming in the opposite direction up this narrow lane, I’m finished. I’ll miss Lionel’s boat.

Don’t think about that either. Don’t think, don’t feel, don’t breathe, don’t be human. You’re used to this, remember? It’s how work used to be.

I get to the boat with seconds to spare and sweat pouring down my face. The other passengers take care not to look at me. There are nine of them, all doing a convincing impression of Happy Tourist Under No Time Pressure At All. I hope they all drown—not literally, but in my head, to make me feel better.

Lionel, not known for his subtlety, leans his face in front of mine and says, “Somebody’s in a tizzy this morning!” I tell him to get me across the water as fast as he can, then blank out his reply—something about journeys taking as long as they take; currents, headwinds, am I with him? If I allowed myself to hear the detail, I’d push him into the river, which would be counterproductive.

It seems to take years, but at last we’re moving across the Dart. A white-haired woman in a green raincoat points at my house as it comes into view at the top of the hill and says, “Look, Morris, up there—is that the Agatha Christie house?”

“Don’t be silly,” Morris replies.

Is he suggesting Speedwell House isn’t good enough for Agatha Christie? He can drown too.

I love my house. There’s only one thing about it that I hate: its proximity to Anne Donbavand.

Using another trick from my London taxi-grabbing, meeting-hopping days, I get out my purse and prepare the exact change for the fare, so that I can press it into Lionel’s hand on the other side and make a quick getaway while the other passengers are fumbling in their pockets for pound coins.

Finally we arrive at the jetty on the Dartmouth side. While we were sailing, I identified the best footpath to take up the hill. I’ve never sprinted uphill before, and would have said it was something I couldn’t do, but there’s no such thing. Everything’s something you can’t do until you have to do it.

Now the foothpath has run out, or else I’ve lost it. That’s more likely. I scramble up the wooded hillside, nearly slipping a few times. Flip-flops aren’t the ideal footwear for this sort of thing. If I fell now, I might land in Lionel’s boat as it fills up to set off back to the Kingswear side.

Against the odds, I arrive in one piece. The Donbavands’ tangerine-colored cottage has a wooden sign attached to its wall to the left of the front door. It must have a name, but I can’t see it. The sign has a large sticker covering its surface—the same size and shape as the one that was stuck over my house sign. This one says “
Wavebreaker
.”

To hide the cottage’s true identity, so that vengeful Allisande Ingrey can’t find her sister Lisette and kill her.

It’s too crazy, but now isn’t the moment to wonder how any of this is possible.

I knock hard on the door. Nothing happens. I hear no movements from within.

Bending down, I shout through the letterbox, “Hello! Anyone home? George? Stephen?” I look in through the narrow, rectangular slit. All is still: an unoccupied house.

“Justine? Is that you?”

I cry out and jump back. The voice is so clear and close. He must be sitting in the hall beneath the letterbox. “George?”

“Yes. Hello! This is a nice surprise.”

“Are you sitting against the door?”

“Yes. It’s what I like to call ‘going out.’ The closest I get these days, I’m afraid.”

Unimaginable.
Yet, on this side of the river, in this house: normal.

“Let me in, George.”

“I can’t. The door’s locked and I haven’t got a key.”

Shit.

“My mother took it. She’s no fool, my mother. She knows that if I had access to a key, the chances of her finding me here when she got home would be slim to say the least.”

“Are you alone in there?”

“Yes. Mum and Dad are at work, and Fleur’s having a trial day at a new school.”

“But not you?” My fingers are starting to ache from holding the letterbox open.

George laughs. “Don’t be silly. I can’t be trusted to be out in the world. Fleur can. She’s our mother’s creation. No mind of her own whatsoever. She’d never be so audacious as to make a friend, or—God forbid—
trust
someone outside the nuclear family. No danger there.”

Where did he learn to talk this way? From his mother? I wonder how many times she’s told him the story of Lisette, Allisande and Perrine Ingrey.

“George, I need to get in.”

“And I need to get out,” he says. “I can’t work out if we share a dilemma or not. I think we probably do.”

“Your windows look single glazed. I’m going to smash one.”

“Really?” He sounds thrilled. “Justine, you are exceptionally cool.”

“I’m not, George. I’m just . . . I have to get into the house.”

“Where’s Ellen? School or home?”

“What? No, you should stay here. I think your mum might be on her way back. She’s angry. She knows you came to our house.”

“She’s always angry. Or crying, or worrying. Trust me, she’ll be at work all day. She’s never back before seven. Dad gets back around five.”

“And they think it’s okay to leave you here alone all day?”

“Well, Mum knows I can’t get out. Until recently they wouldn’t have left me unattended, but a state of emergency has been declared. I told my parents that Ellen and I are engaged.”

“Yes, I . . . Right.” Is he waiting for me to congratulate him?

They can’t leave him locked in the house all day long. For how many days? What’s the plan?

Instead of breaking and entering, I should call Social Services. If I’m lucky, they’ll send someone to speak to me who doesn’t organize charity fun runs with Stephen Donbavand.

“Can you smash the living room window?” George asks. “At the back, the farthest one on what will be your right. That will upset Mum most.”

I release the letterbox and run around to the back garden. I nearly laugh when I see what’s lying on the grass: a large, mud-encrusted shovel. Stephen must have been exhausted after staying up all night digging a grave in my lawn. He came home, dropped his spade and hasn’t been able to bring himself to pick it up since.

It’s too heavy for me to lift above my head, so I swing it upward toward the glass. The window smashes instantly. George is standing on the other side, wide-eyed with what looks like joy. “Use the spade to go around the frame and push out all the jagged bits,” he advises. “That’s it.” There’s no question of me getting in before he’s out. He’s already got one foot up on the sill.

“Careful,” I say. “There might be fragments. Don’t cut yourself.”

“I’m fine. Where’s Ellen? School?” He propels himself out and lands on the grass next to me. He’s wearing dark blue jeans, red shoes and a khaki T-shirt, frayed at the neck. It looks as if it might once have had letters on it.

I think of Germander—the three letters that fell off the sign.

“I don’t know where Ellen is now,” I say. “She was at home when I left—your mother paid us a visit, so she didn’t go to school on the bus.”

“Ugh. I’m so sorry Mater inflicted herself on you.”

“I think Alex will probably have taken Ellen to school by now, but I’m not sure. She might want to wait at home for me to come back. She knew I was coming here.”

“Right. I’ll try school first, then Speedwell House,” says George. “I’d better hurry or I’ll miss Lionel’s boat. Help yourself to tea and coffee.” He laughs. “That’s funny, isn’t it? I mean, in the circumstances.”

“It is. George, wait. Would you be able to hide something and get away with it? I mean . . . does your mum search your stuff?”

“No. She wouldn’t bother. She knows I don’t have anything apart from ‘permitted items.’ ” He makes air quotes with his fingers.

I pull my mobile phone out of my bag and check to see if it’s getting a signal here. It is. I hand it to George. “Take this. There’s an envelope icon—that’s my email. Click on it and you’ll go to my inbox. You’ll find some emails Ellen sent me—click on reply and you can email her. Hide it in your room, somewhere your mum never goes, and you can email Ellen whenever you want. Do you know how to send emails?”

George nods. “Ellen showed me, on her iPod.” He turns the phone over, inspecting it from all angles. “But what about you? How will you manage without it?”

“I’ll buy another one.”

“But until you do, how will you call people?”

“I don’t want to call anyone. I don’t want anyone to be able to call me. The less time I spend communicating with other people, the better—Ellen and Alex not included.”

“You’re the opposite of me. I just love people!” George beams. “I want to talk to anyone and everyone, apart from my mother. Dad and Fleur don’t count. They’re just replicas of her. When I told them all about me and Ellen being engaged, they all said the exact same thing.”

He wants me to ask, but I can’t face it. I nod and try to look supportive—as if I’d have said something better.

“So . . . Justine, are you sure about this?” George asks. He’s weighing my phone in the palm of his hand as if it’s a bar of gold. “It’s so generous of you. Do I deserve it?” He frowns. “What if I read all your personal emails? I promise I won’t!”

“You’re welcome to. There’s nothing secret in there.” I invented a different email address for my correspondence with Ops, and those messages don’t automatically upload to my phone. Even if George searched the internet history, he wouldn’t be able to get into the account. It’s password-protected. “If you dig deep enough and get to last year, you’ll find me ranting and swearing like a madwoman about injustices in the world of TV drama, but then you know all about that already: the Ben Lourenco business.”

He looks worried. “How do you know I know about it? Did Ellen tell you?”

Wait. My turn first.
“George, who’s Lisette Ingrey?”

His eyes widen. His Adam’s apple jerks up and down in his throat.

“Did your mother tell you that was her name, before she changed it? Did she tell you your name was once Urban Ingrey?”

“What do you mean did she tell me? Are you saying it’s not true?”

I shouldn’t have brought it up. Terrible timing. Whatever George believes about her never getting home before seven, Anne might be on her way back. I may not have long.

“It’s true, Justine—everything Ellen’s told you.” George looks upset. “I hope you don’t believe in . . . bad blood or anything like that. I think that’s a silly superstition, with no scientific basis,” he blurts out defensively. “Just because my aunt was who she was, that doesn’t tell you anything about me. I could no sooner murder anybody than rollerskate to Mars!”

“George, I . . . really, I don’t think anything bad about you. Please don’t worry about that.”

He hates his mother. He’s clever enough to see exactly how destructive she is. But he believes what she’s told him about her past history—believes it unquestioningly.

It can’t be my job to tell him his mother’s as much of a liar as she is a tyrant. In an ideal world, that task would fall to Stephen Donbavand—useless waste of space that he is.

“Thank you, Justine—for your faith in me. I promise you, I won’t let you down.”

“We can’t have this conversation now, George,” I say.
I need to search your house.
“Take the phone. Hide it.”

“You are truly the loveliest of people.”

My eyes fill with tears. It’s pathetic, no doubt, but I can’t help it.

“Justine? When you’ve finished in the house, before you leave, make sure you don’t block up the window or anything. Leave it open or I won’t be able to get back in. I’m going to pretend I was upstairs all day and didn’t hear it smash.”

I nod. George stuffs the phone into his jeans pocket, bows to me as if I’m the Queen and he’s my humble servant, and tears off down the hill to Lionel’s boat.

I climb into his house through the window. The first thing I spot in the predominantly brown and beige living room is a sideboard with open doors. There are board games and jigsaw puzzles inside it, and more piled high on top. In a corner, there’s a TV but no DVD player. Nondescript landscape paintings on the walls, two sofas that have an aged, crushed look about them. Two fat bookcases full of all kinds of books: novels, dictionaries, Assyriology tomes, books about economics. Why so many dictionaries? I wonder. There are more than ten, and none for foreign languages. Did Anne keep buying new editions in the hope that the meaning of “truth” might change—that suddenly, in 2010 or 2011, the word might be redefined in her favor?

Truth: whatever shit you feel like inventing, to make everyone who knows you wonder if they’re going mad. Former meaning: that which is in accordance with fact or reality.

There’s a dreary gray and black galley kitchen at the back of the house, and a downstairs loo that ought to have been left as an under-stairs cupboard. Apart from that, the whole ground floor is the living room. I go upstairs and find what I expected: three bedrooms—a double and two singles—and a bathroom.

This isn’t right. If I didn’t know better, I would assume a normal family lived in this house. Fleur’s bedroom is spotlessly tidy. All over the walls, there are posters of what must be some kind of girl band: The Saturdays. George’s room is mainly tidy, but not immaculate like his sister’s. There are a few heaps of clothes on the floor. He has a bookcase in his room that’s stuffed full of novels: Dickens, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Robert Graves, Tolstoy.