The One Safe Place (38 page)

She went into the front room and peered along the darkening street, where the only movements were of cars returning home. As her knuckles touched the chill glass of the window the first streetlamps lit up, showing her how dark it was. In some parts of the city it must already be darker. She stepped back so as not to frighten Marshall off—in case that could be any kind of possibility—and switched on the light, and hoped the view of the lit room from the far end of the street would act as a beacon. She imagined having to apologise to the police when they arrived, imagined how embarrassed she would be to have to tell them Marshall had beaten them to it, how much more embarrassed he would be, especially at having to apologise to them. She didn't fully realise how these thoughts were sustaining her until a police car as white as a headstone swung into view at the end of the road.

She opened the front door as the car drew up outside the house. The breath she took as the headlamps faded and died felt as cold as the night was threatening to be. The car spread the white wings of its doors, and two men in black rose from it, capping their heads. The simultaneous closing of the doors sounded like a single blow with an enormous blade, and the houses were sending it flatly back when the foremost policeman opened her gate. "Mrs., or is it Professor Travis?"

"Mrs. is fine."

As he strode up the path she saw the scent tug his head the merest fraction toward the lavender plant. His large blue eyes, set widely in his broad round face, gave her the impression of being aware of much that he wasn't looking at directly, which compensated to some extent for his apparent youthfulness. His even more fresh-faced colleague closed the gate, holding the latch between finger and thumb as if it was a piece of evidence, and the blue-eyed policeman pointed both hands at Susanne. "Please. We'll follow."

She mustn't expect them to be bringing her news. They took off their caps as they entered the house, but that only meant they were being polite. She shrugged off a chill which had followed them into the house and watched until both outer doors were shut, then she ushered them into the front room and sat facing the window. You didn't offer British policemen a drink on duty, she knew that much, or if you were supposed to offer one to allow them to refuse she hadn't time for the ritual, nor for making them coffee, nor for anything else that would delay their doing their job. As the blue-eyed policeman sat on the couch to her left she said, "I told you my name but I didn't get yours."

"You told the station, the desk sergeant," he said with an air of gentle reproof which seemed to imply they had better be precise from the outset. "PC Askew and PC Angel."

The initials didn't mean politically correct, she knew, and presumably he'd named himself first, because neither his eyes nor his hands had referred to his colleague, who'd found a seat to her right. Though he pronounced his own name with the accent on the first syllable, the names still sounded like a British comedy duo, and Susanne couldn't help reflecting that although it had taken an inspector and his team to deal with her videos, a couple of constables were apparently considered sufficient for Marshall. So long as they were good at their job, did it matter? They wouldn't be the only ones involved in the investigation. "What do you need me to tell you?" she said.

Blue-eyed Askew produced a notebook and a rudimentary ballpoint without taking his eyes off her. "Your full name, Mrs. Travis, and your date and place of birth."

All her resolution to conduct the interview as swiftly and efficiently as possible collapsed at once. "Do you really need all that at this stage? Can't you take a description of my son first? I only asked you to come here because your sergeant wouldn't let me phone it in."

"I'm sure you can appreciate why, Mrs. Travis. If we started proceedings on the basis of every phone call we receive—"

"Sure, but now you've seen I'm not a crank. I wish I hadn't had to phone at all. Can't you just put out a description before you do the rest of the paperwork? There's too much of that in too many jobs these days."

"So they say," Askew said, making his reluctance more apparent as he placed the pen and notebook next to the heap of essays on the table. "Have you any reason to suppose your son is in danger?"

The question seemed cruelly direct even if it was legitimate. "I should think you'd know the possibilities as well as I do," Susanne said.

"I take your point, but is there anything specific? How long has he been missing?"

That was another question she would have preferred not to consider. "Nearly seven hours."

"Seven hours." It wasn't clear what if any difference rounding up the amount made to Askew. "Can you tell us when he was last sighted to your knowledge?"

"At school. Bushy Road School."

"They had a half-day off, did they?"

"No, he—" Susanne felt as if she was about to be compelled to pick her way through all the thoughts she'd already had. "He had a disagreement with the headmaster, and I'm afraid he walked."

"A disagreement with the headmaster."

"Over something someone had said about me. Don't get the idea he routinely goes AWOL. This is the first time, here or where we came from."

"How long have you been in this country, Mrs. Travis?"

That was Angel, whose long bony face had produced an almost invisible blond moustache once he was in the light. She wished he had remained silent if he was going to slow things down further. "Nine months. Is that relevant?"

"Was your son happy with the move?"

"Yes, very. It was his idea as much as, as anyone's. We wouldn't have done it if he hadn't wanted to."

"You don't think it's possible he might have changed his mind."

"I don't, because he would have told me. We've always talked." Askew's scrutiny was starting to play on her nerves; it felt like her own doubts rendered visible. "What?" she demanded, in the way she'd thought only characters in modes did.

"He's twelve, isn't he, Mrs. Travis? Boys do change around that age."

"I know that. We all do. It doesn't mean—" If she let them they could make her feel she had been wilfully unobservant, neglectful, no kind of a parent now that Marshall had only one. "This is crazy," she said. "Why are we even discussing—I'll show you he isn't trying to go back home. He never would without me."

It took her well under a minute to run up to the study and switch on the light and pull out the desk drawer, but that was long enough for her to become unsure what she wanted to find. Just supposing Marshall's passport wasn't there, wouldn't that make him easy to locate when he tried to use it? She turned over the the topmost of the face-down passports, and it fell open at Don's photograph, looking as though being photographed had come as a shock to him. They'd laughed at that every time they'd used the documents, but now her innards tightened, because he looked helplessly shocked by what he saw coming. She shut the passport hastily and grabbed Marshall's from beneath hers. Now her dash seemed pointless, an illusion of activity; worse, it had shown her how much she would have liked to be proved wrong. She ran down even faster to display the evidence. "Here he is. I mean, this is his," she said, furious with losing her grip on language. "He can't have gone far without this."

Askew leafed through the passport with, she thought, unnecessary thoroughness before laying it on the table. He'd already raised his eyes to her. "May I ask if you're a single parent family?"

Other than "media" used as a singular noun, few abuses of language annoyed her more—a person couldn't be a family, yet she'd lost count of the number of people she'd heard making that claim—but this was no occasion for discussing niceties of usage. "My husband's dead," she told him, the words raw in her mouth.

"Would that have been recently, Mrs. Travis?"

"Three months ago. You'd have heard about it," she said, which meant she had to go on. "He was kicked to death outside his bookshop downtown."

"I do recall the case. Wasn't there a gun involved?"

"My husband thought we needed some defence, and what happened shows we did." She wasn't sure how appropriate her flaring anger was; it would hardly help Marshall, and she was about to drop the subject when Askew said, "How did your son feel about it?"

"Bad. How on earth do you imagine he would feel?"

"Do you think that may have any bearing on his absence?"

Susanne had a sudden image, as fleeting and yet lingering as the glare of a flashbulb, of Marshall discovering where the Fancy family lived and going there to extract some revenge for Don's death. "What kind of—what?"

"Has your husband a grave near enough for him to visit?"

"Well—yes." For a moment Susanne was astonished that she'd been so involved in her situation that she had been unable to see that possibility; then her emotions slumped. "He wouldn't be there now. They lock the gates at dusk."

"Where else can you think of he might be?"

"I called all his friends before I called you. He's made plenty of friends, but none of them knew where he is."

"You don't think it's possible any of them were protecting him."

"From what? From me, his mother?"

"I'm just suggesting, Mrs. Travis, that he may be afraid to face you since he, as you say, went AWOL"

"Not seven hours' worth of afraid, no. Not so afraid he wouldn't realise I'd be as worried as I am. Even if he didn't want to face me he'd have left a message on the machine." A bunch of aches made her aware that she was gripping her fist with her other hand. "You have to take my word for it. I know there's more to this," she forced herself to say. "Otherwise he would at least have called by now."

"I'm sorry if we seem unduly thorough. Limited resources, you may have heard." Askew's hand moved in the direction of his notebook, but only as far as his knee. "Can you think of any film your son would have seen that might have suggested a course of action to him?"

"Such as what? He reads more books than he sees movies," Susanne said, trying to fight down her anger. How much did the policemen already know or think they knew about her? "He doesn't imitate anything he reads or watches."

"As long as you're sure of that, Mrs. Travis."

It wasn't Askew's scepticism which infuriated her so much as the slyness of it—his assumption that she couldn't be certain it was there. "If you want to discuss movies with me you'll have to enroll in my class," she said, but that was all the lightness she could summon up. "Maybe I should make this one point clear. You confiscated all our videos, the police did, but you won't be prosecuting. Someone someplace must have seen some sense."

"If you say so, Mrs. Travis."

"Listen," Susanne said, and steadied her lips with a finger. "If either of you feels my son and I deserve what's been happening to us these last few months, if you feel we brought it on ourselves somehow, don't be afraid to share your thoughts with me. Let's at least respect each other."

Angel cleared his throat with two high sharp curt sounds. "Maybe if your husband—"

"We aren't here to express that kind of opinion, Mrs. Travis. I hope you don't think it would affect our handling of your problem."

"I hope I won't have reason to. Maybe if my husband what?"

"Mrs. Travis, we can argue," Askew said, "or we can do our best to find out what's happened to your son."

"Fine, let's do that. I'm convinced I need your help to find him. If I haven't convinced you, just tell me how."

Askew met her stare with his wide-angled gaze. "I still need the details I asked you for."

So it had come to a trade-off. Susanne felt as though she was being given a lesson in communication and human relations, one she would happily have skipped. When he picked up his notebook she could only resolve to answer all his questions. Her full name, her date and place of birth, her nationality—the quicker she told him all these and the same for Marshall, the sooner the police would track down her son. Askew continued writing deliberately for so long after she'd shot him the answers that her determination not to interrupt him was about to collapse when he said, "Have you a better photograph of him?"

"Bigger, you mean. There's the one on the mantel, only it's a year old."

In it Marshall was wearing a tropical shirt and pointing his thumb over his shoulder at three alligators. "Aren't they caged?" Askew said. "They look very close."

"My husband used a telephoto lens. Marshall wasn't in any danger." Far less than he might be in now, she thought, daring Askew even to hint that he believed she was given to exposing him to danger, and then she realised which photograph she could lend. "Wait," she said, and ran into the dining room to fetch the photograph which the Bushy Road school photographer had made.

Askew received it with more approval than she had previously seen him admit. "He'll be wearing this uniform, will he?"

"No." She was so appalled to realise that she hadn't used any of her time to check how he would be dressed that for some seconds she was as dumb as she felt, then her thoughts were too much to contain. "He came home and got changed while I was teaching. That's why I know something's happened He must have meant to be back by the time I was, or he'd have left me a note."

If Askew challenged that, how much more time might they waste? But he only said, "Are you able to tell us what he will be wearing?"

"I'm sure I can." Upstairs again, her head beginning lo pound like her heart, she switched on Marshall's light. His uniform was still laid out on the bed, a sight from which she recoiled to examine his other empty clothes, which fell cold and slack as she sorted through them. Once she'd made herself be thorough she checked the washing basket, but his favourite outfit wasn't there either, and so she raced downstairs. "He'll be in a purple Nike track suit," she panted.

Askew wrote that down. "Shoes?"

She'd noticed without noticing she had. "White Reebok trainers."

"Just like my two," Askew said, presumably referring to children rather than footwear, and made a final note as he stood up. "May I take the photograph?"

"You'll let me have it back, won't you? Marshall was proud of it." She would have corrected the past tense except that might aggravate her nervousness. She watched Marshall disappear as the policeman turned the photograph away from her, and blurted, "If you need to show his picture on television..."