The Start of Everything (30 page)

I show my warrant card but put on an unserious expression. “We might have some good news for George Hart-Fraser! Is he in?” Damn, that was
too
jolly. Surely no one falls for that sort of thing anymore, do they?

“What about?” she asks, her body filling the entirety of the cautious slit she’s allowed the door to open. She has on a full-sleeved peasant blouse and a sloppy purple skirt. She’s barefoot. Artist? Or an academic herself? Perhaps raising kids, with a baby asleep in the background?

“It’s about his watch. When will he be in?”

She says they’ll both be in this evening, after five. Her name is Juliet, she tells me when I ask. It might have been a sweet name in her teens, but I, personally, wouldn’t want to be a doomed heroine into my thirties and beyond.

“Has he missed it?” I ask, no notebook, half-turned, as if in passing.

“Missed what?”

“His watch?”

“You’ll have to ask him.” She backs up while closing the door, filling the view so that I don’t catch even a glimpse inside. The interaction
folds closed so gracefully, it brings to mind the shutting of a pop-up book.

Dru exits the restaurant first, taking the brunt of pushing the revolving door. Max steps into the section behind her, not touching the glass. She really does seem weak, and probably expert at avoiding germs by not touching anything. Tears spark in my eyes, mother-daughter-cancer-death-babies tears, a pregnancy reflex that has dogged me for weeks. My eyes get wet at television programmes, at sentimental greeting cards, at child-sized mannequins in outfits costing more than my weekly pay in the window of John Lewis. I even cry at that series of BT adverts, will-they-or-won’t-they make it as a family and how can their BT phones and Internet service help make that happen? That time they were talking, and the substandard, non-BT phone connection cut short his apology and she thought he’d rung off on her? That one? I
bawled
. I told Dan I’d bit my tongue and it was bleeding.

Mrs. Bennet
en famille
crosses Trumpington Street. They head back towards the school and I follow discreetly. They gather around their car. Goodbyes, hugs, seatbelts, brake lights, reverse. Mum and Max leave Dru standing on the campus grass, waving her arm back and forth from a hinge at the elbow. Her hair gets blown forward and tangles round her face. I hang back until she turns away.

I follow her to a plain brick Victorian. Potted plants cling to the edges of the steps.

“Dru,” I say, to make her turn around. “Dru,” I repeat. “We have to talk about it. I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Is there someone here you trust? The housemistress? Do you like her?” I require an “appropriate adult” to witness any interview with a child.

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Dru, we can make him stop. It won’t have to happen anymore.”

A big-haired woman in jeans opens the door. She carries a shallow cardboard box holding yet more plants. She must have brought them in from the brief flurry yesterday, and is returning them to their outside home. “Hi, I’m Missy Barnes!” She sounds American. She plonks
the heavy box down at the bottom landing and shoots out her hand for a shake.

“Are you the housemistress?” I ask. She is. I show her my warrant card. “Is there somewhere the three of us can talk?”

“What’s this about?”

“Best to say in private.”

“No!” says Dru. “I don’t want to be alone with her. I don’t have to be alone with her.”

“No, you don’t,” I agree. I can’t force her, and it would do her no good if I tried. If we’re right about what happened, she’s been forced enough. “But if you do, we can make it stop. Don’t you want it to stop?”

Missy Barnes holds up one hand. “Stop what? Miss Detective, I think you need to explain yourself.”

I almost laugh at such a moniker spoken so indignantly. “We have reason to believe that Dru may have been sexually assaulted. I’m eager to get her the help she needs.”

Her blue eyes get big. She bends to Dru’s height. “Honey? Did something happen?”

Dru fish-mouths a few times: open, closed. “No! I’ve never done anything.”

“I think someone did something
to
you,” I say.

Dru grabs her housemistress’s arm. “Ms. Barnes, can you make her go away? Nobody’s done anything to me.”

“You don’t have to talk to me,” I admit. “But if I believe that you have been assaulted in your home, I’m obliged to alert Children’s Services. They will be required to investigate.”

Ms. Barnes takes both Dru’s hands in both of hers. “Sweetheart …” she says, and tries to pull her in for a hug.

Dru twists her hands out of the grip. “Call my mother,” she says. Dru has brown eyes, polished-wood brown. She turns them on me, unblinking. “She’ll tell you you’re wrong.”

I have no doubt she will.

Ms. Barnes already has her phone out, pressing at it with her thumbs to scroll through, I assume, a roster of family contacts.

“You don’t have to do that,” I say. We can approach this from the side of questioning Mr. Bennet. Maybe we can trip him up. Maybe
someone at Deeping House will have something to say. Not Dru—not yet, anyway. She’s safe here at school, and clearly not interested in making words out of the memories.

“Mrs. Rodgers? This is Missy Barnes. From the Leys. Your daughter asked me to phone. I hope you’ll call back, okay? Okay. Bye!”

The one-time Mrs. Rodgers, now Bennet, isn’t picking up the phone, presumably because she’s on the road.

“Dru, I’m going to leave now,” I say, “but this is my card. Please phone if there’s anything you want to talk about. I want to help.” I try to say the same to Ms. Barnes, but she’s hitting the buttons for another call.

“Hello? Mr. Rodgers?”

“Bennet,” Dru and I both correct. I smile at the lucky simultaneity, but get in return only the back of Dru’s head. A thin braid hangs straight down with a little daisy woven into the end of it, Max’s doing.

“Can I speak to Mr. Bennet, please?”; “I’m calling from his daughter’s school.”; “When will he be available to speak? Can you ask him to call me back? Who are you, exactly?”

Dru leans against the iron railing edging the steps. She runs her fingers over the spindly rails, like plucking at a harp.

“Thank you.” Thumb,
beep, click
. Then the Allman Brothers song from the Barclaycard advert starts up. Ms. Barnes glances at the name and brings it up to her ear so quickly she smacks herself in the head. “Hello? Yes? Mrs. Rodgers? Bennet? Mrs. Bennet?”

Missy Barnes flusters easily.

“Some woman who says she’s a detective is here and she’s said some things that Dru says aren’t true. I really think you should—okay, thanks. In a few.”
Click;
phone into pocket. “Dru, honey, she’s on her way.”

Mrs. Bennet will complain. Best to stay and try to smooth it than run away and leave it to Missy Barnes’s potential hyperbole.

I’m invited to wait with them in the common room. A teenage girl pops popcorn in the kitchen and wants to know if we’d like any. Another one wants to play Wii in here. Ms. Barnes says no, and slides the pocket door shut. It screeches and rumbles as if it’s not used to being closed.

CHAPTER 26

GEORGE HART-FRASER

A
siren keened past the house. Juliet looked up from the stove. She followed the sound with a turn of her head.

That wailing effect is immediately interpreted by our ears in the same way that perspective is interpreted by our eyes. The rising sound is coming; the lowering sound is going. The smaller object is farther away; the larger object is closer. We understand these things without thinking about them.

This effect on the scale of distant space manifests in colour. There’s a red tint that increases as objects speed away from Earth. A blue tint means an object is coming towards us. That’s rare, because everything is supposed to be rushing away from everything else. That’s the way the universe works. It expands.

The galaxies farther from us are also faster. Therefore, detecting greater speed proves greater distance. Greater distance … takes us back in time.

Light has a fixed speed. When it has a short distance to travel, what
we receive in our eyes is very close in age to the actual age of the object. The farther the light has to travel between object and eye, the bigger the age gap. In the time it takes for me to receive the light-image of a young blue star in a galaxy some tens of millions of light-years away, it will have grown to maturity. I will look right at the red giant and see the infant.

The reddest, fastest galaxies, which are the farthest galaxies, show us the infant universe. Because of the time it takes for light to travel, we could look right at their corpses and see their births.

“Do you think that’s a fire engine?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“It could be an ambulance.”

“It could.”

“Or the police.”

“It’s passed. What does it matter?” I clicked the browser window shut and spun in my chair. Juliet pushed eggs around a pan.

“I wish we could see out of that window.” The kitchen in this place was on the bottom, at basement level. The bay window swelled out onto a sub-pavement patio. It brought light but no view.

“It would only show us traffic.”

She slopped the eggs onto plates, with Ryvita crackers and chives she’d grown in a pot outside. “Enjoying the term so far?”

Talking while eating was the sacrifice the relationship required. If I talked over meals, all else was forgiven. She’d been recently away in the States on a research trip, so at least we had the past few weeks to talk about. “We’ve lost a student. Second year Maths. She degraded. It doesn’t surprise me.”

“Wasn’t she up for it?”

I shook my head. “Never prepared.”

“They’re so young. Maybe she’ll come back ready.”

“I don’t think so.” Readiness can grow, but that’s of little consequence without a passion for the subject; the urge is either there or it isn’t. “I don’t know why she was admitted.”

I hadn’t interviewed Grace Rhys. I don’t know what she said that made Tobias bring her in. He shows terrible judgement sometimes. In
ten years, he’d gradually stepped down from the pedestal I’d put him on. It was a slow thing. As he aged and I matured, he’d grown distracted and I’d grown frustrated with him.

So things were already tense before he brought the watch into it.

“I need the car today,” she said, slinging her bag over her shoulder. She works at Addenbrooke’s, and normally catches the bus. She must have had errands. She left her plate on the table for me to deal with. That was the exchange; she had cooked.

“That’s fine.”

She went upstairs. That’s why, when the phone rang, she scooped it up. It was right next to her, on the table by the door. I bounded up the steps, but she already had it up to her ear.

“Mrs. Hart-Fraser! How are you?” She lifted her eyebrows at me. She knows I hate these calls. Her head bobbed with what I assume was the cadence of Mother’s rambling monologue. Finally, “Well, here he is! Bye!” She passed me the handset; her kiss hit my ear as I turned my head. I waved goodbye over my shoulder.