An Empty Death (49 page)
Authors: Laura Wilson
Still, no plan came into his mind, just the desperate, repeated thought that he must regain control of his life. Now to find the house . . . Before, when he’d followed the big policeman home, he’d got off the bus, crossed the road, and . . . that’s right, they’d passed this bakery, and the house with the tall hedge - he remembered that - and then a right turn, and then . . .
Here it was. Number 27. He opened the gate, went up the front path, grabbed the door knocker and beat it down, hard, several times. He could hear the noise reverberate through the small house, but no-one came. He must be here, he must . . . He was a married man, wasn’t he? Where else would he be at the end of the day? The pub, perhaps?
He deliberated. He could hardly walk about trying to find Stratton and making himself conspicuous. He chewed his lip, coming to no conclusion, then, at last, hearing quiet footsteps coming down the stairs, knocked again. What if Stratton’s wife were there? He hadn’t considered that . . . He was wondering whether to call through the letter box or just wait, when he saw a woman waving from the other side of the garden gate. ‘Are you all right?’ Her voice had a thready, bleating sound. ‘I saw you out here - I’m from next door. Mr Stratton’s not home yet - he’s a copper, works all sorts of hours. Mrs Stratton’ll be at the Rest Centre, if it’s her you’re wanting.’
‘I was looking for Mr Stratton.’
‘Well, I don’t rightly know what to suggest - never know when he’ll be back. I could give him a message, if you like.’
‘I’m afraid it’s rather confidential.’
The woman looked disappointed. ‘Well, I suppose he might be at the Swan, or up at his allotment. If you’re wanting to speak to him urgently, then I’d try the Rest Centre first, see if Mrs Stratton knows where he is.’
‘I will. Thank you. If you could point me in the right direction . . . ?’
Dacre set off in the direction indicated, and found the Rest Centre - a converted school - without difficulty. Seeing no-one around, he wandered into a classroom where a woman was sorting through heaps of clothes. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m looking for Mrs Stratton.’
‘She’ll be in the kitchen. Go down the corridor, right at the end, through the big room and turn left.’
‘Thank you.’
Dacre followed her instructions, and found himself in the big room, which, judging by the wood panelling, the crest and the row of dreary oil paintings of stern-looking men in academic garb, had previously been the school hall. He crossed the parquet floor and was about to exit in the direction of the kitchen when the door he’d come through flew open and a small, dishevelled-looking woman rushed towards him.
‘Can you help me? Please?’ Her voice was shrill and distressed, and, as she came closer, Dacre saw that the thick woollen coat she clutched tightly round her was - as well as being too warm for the season - far too large for her tiny frame. Her hair had fallen down at one side, and her eyes were frantic.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Have you seen her?’
Must be a flying-bomb victim, Dacre thought, searching for relatives - her children, perhaps. ‘If you’re looking for someone,’ he said, gently, ‘there’s a lady down the corridor who might know. Shall I take you to her?’
‘No, no. She might be one of them.’
‘Them?’
‘Yes. Will you help me? Please?’
‘I’ll do my best,’ said Dacre. It wouldn’t hurt, he decided. Stratton’s wife wasn’t going to go anywhere, and the big policeman was bound to come home at some point, so he could always go back to the house. Besides, the woman looked so pitiful, so afraid and bewildered, that he couldn’t just leave her.
‘Oh, thank you. Thank you.’
‘Why don’t you come and sit down?’ Dacre indicated the line of hard wooden chairs at the side of the room.
‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘Thank you.’
Perched on the edge of one of the chairs, shivering, knees squeezed together, she said, ‘Will you help me? There’s no-one else.’
She’s obviously lost everyone, thought Dacre. Staring at this pathetic scrap of forlorn humanity that trembled beside him, he said, ‘What’s the trouble?’
‘It’s her. Them. All of them.’
‘All of who?’
‘These people. They keep sending him back.’
‘Sending who back?’
The woman stared at him, seemingly paralysed by fear. Start at the beginning, Dacre told himself. Try to get some sense out of her. Perhaps she was concussed - it would certainly account for her state. ‘I’m Dr Dacre,’ he said. ‘What’s—’
‘You’re one of them.’ She drew back, her eyes flicking between the doors at either end of the room, measuring the distance, wondering if she could make a run for it.
‘No,’ said Dacre. ‘I’m not. I can help you.’
‘How do I know that?’
Perhaps she wasn’t concussed, Dacre thought. Perhaps it was more than that. ‘Because I’m only pretending to be a doctor. I had to, to get away from them. What’s your name?’
‘Ingram. I can see you’re not really a doctor, now. You don’t look like the other one. He kept asking me questions.’
‘Tell me about the other doctor,’ said Dacre.
‘Makepeace. He’s their doctor. Her doctor. Keeps giving me stuff, but I’ve not been taking it. I know his game.’
‘Very sensible,’ said Dacre. ‘I’d have done exactly the same.’
‘I put it down the lav,’ she said conspiratorially.
A him - the one that they kept sending back - and a her. Paranoid delusion, thought Dacre, play along with it. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘They don’t fool me, either. I’ve managed to escape from them, you see. That’s why I can help you.’
‘It started when my house was bombed,’ she said. ‘Or that’s what they told me. I remember something, but I’m not sure what it was. Horrible. They said it came down on top of me, but they tell lies, so I don’t know if that’s what happened. Then they started with all this, saying they were trying to help me, but they’ve taken Eric, and I don’t know what they’ve done with him.’
‘Who’s Eric?’
‘My husband. He’s in the army, or he was, before . . . There’s this other man who looks like him. They hired him because he looks like Eric. I don’t know how they thought they could fool me, because you always know, don’t you?’
‘Of course you do. This man, he claims to be your husband, does he?’
‘That’s right. But I wasn’t born yesterday, you know. Do you understand what I’m talking about?’
‘Yes, I do. Does he sound like Eric?’
‘Oh, they’ve got everything right. They’re very clever with what they can do nowadays. Perverted science, that’s what Mr Churchill called it. I don’t know why they want to behave like that when I’ve done nothing to them.’
Dacre remembered the psychiatry textbook. A rare disorder . . . A person believes that someone has been replaced by an imposter of identical appearance and behaviour . . . Something like that, at any rate. What was it called? ‘Who got everything right?’ he asked.
‘Them.’
Cat-something? No, that wasn’t it. ‘What are their names?’
Mrs Ingram’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘I thought you knew them.’
Cat . . . Cag . . . What was it? ‘I do. But they use different people. Agents. You can see why - from their point of view, I mean.’
Cap . . . Capgras, that was it. The Capgras Delusion. It must be. His first diagnosis. He bet no-one else knew what was wrong with her. If he were a psychiatrist, he’d be able to write it up. He could make a study of it. He imagined himself lecturing to a hall full of students.
‘Mr and Mrs Kerr, it was. Now it’s Mrs Stratton.’
‘And Inspector Stratton?’
‘Inspector? Do you know him? How do you know him?’
Dacre’s mind raced. Her agitation was such that he felt afraid of going near her in the same unhappy, unreasoning way that he was afraid of birds when they got into rooms and beat up and down trying to get out: an absolute, visceral terror. ‘They’ve been after me, too.’
‘They didn’t tell me he was a policeman. Oh . . .’ Mrs Ingram shook her head. ‘Very clever. A policeman. We’ve got to find her.’ She stood up, and, as she did so, one side of the heavy coat fell open and Dacre saw, concealed inside, something long and thin, wrapped in newspaper, a wooden handle protruding from the top. Jesus . . . Dacre felt sick. What was she going to do?
‘Come on,’ she hissed.
‘We don’t know where she is,’ said Dacre, desperately. ‘She may not be here at all.’
‘She is. She said she was coming here. She told me. I think she’s in the kitchen.’
‘Well, she’s not there now,’ lied Dacre. ‘No-one is. I’ve looked.’
‘She’s probably just gone outside. We’ll go in there and wait till she comes back.’
‘Wait!’ Dacre grabbed the woman’s wrist. ‘It’s not safe,’ he whispered. ‘There’s others around - more of them - they might be expecting us.’
‘They don’t know I’m here. And I’ve got this.’ She shook him off, took out the parcel and began to unwrap it. Dacre stared - it was a carving knife. ‘It’s hers. I took it from her kitchen.’
‘Stop! No—’ As he raised his hand to take hold of her arm once more, she slashed at him, a movement so swift he didn’t register it properly until he felt a stinging pain and saw a line of blood appear across his knuckles.
Seeing the blood, Mrs Ingram backed away from him, holding the knife out in front of her. ‘If you’re one of them . . .’ Her eyes glittered. ‘If you are . . .’
Dacre shook his head frantically, and put his hands up in a gesture of surrender. ‘No . . . I just think it may not be safe . . . not yet . . .’
They stared at each other for a second, panting slightly, then turned, in unison, towards the door as footsteps echoed in the corridor outside. Mrs Ingram shoved the knife back inside her coat, and, in an instinctively feminine gesture that made her seem even more deranged than before, reached up to adjust her wonky hair. For a moment, they stood side by side, erect and tense, like soldiers awaiting inspection by a general.
The doors swung open, framing the big policeman, and, in that instant, Mrs Ingram swung round and ran for the doors at the opposite end of the room. ‘Wait!’ shouted Dacre, vainly, rushing after her. Two steps later, he felt himself hit in the back by a heavy weight which sent him sprawling to the floor. ‘Stop her!’ he shouted. ‘You’ve got to stop her!’
Sixty
T
he washing-up water was greasy and cooling rapidly. Lifting out the last of the plates, Jenny decided she’d better boil the kettle before she tackled any more of the dirty crocks on the table. Every time she looked there seemed to be more cups and dishes, although she knew this couldn’t be possible because Mrs Haskins had brought them all through before she’d left for the evening. It’s because I’m tired, she thought, wiping her hands. They were so rough and red nowadays - last winter, the skin on her fingertips had split painfully, and her wedding ring had actually begun to chafe. She hadn’t taken it off, though. She never had, ever since they’d got married. Staring ruefully at her hands she thought, They look as if they belong to an old woman. A pair of decent gloves would help - her last pair of cotton ones were almost beyond saving. Where on earth would they get baby clothes? she wondered. She’d given Monica and Peter’s away long ago, and the crib. They’d give you extra coupons, she thought, but how far would they go . . . ? The memory of Monica and Peter’s baby clothes suddenly made her smile. So small it scarcely seemed possible they were for a living breathing baby, not a doll. Unbidden, her hands went to circle her stomach.
he washing-up water was greasy and cooling rapidly. Lifting out the last of the plates, Jenny decided she’d better boil the kettle before she tackled any more of the dirty crocks on the table. Every time she looked there seemed to be more cups and dishes, although she knew this couldn’t be possible because Mrs Haskins had brought them all through before she’d left for the evening. It’s because I’m tired, she thought, wiping her hands. They were so rough and red nowadays - last winter, the skin on her fingertips had split painfully, and her wedding ring had actually begun to chafe. She hadn’t taken it off, though. She never had, ever since they’d got married. Staring ruefully at her hands she thought, They look as if they belong to an old woman. A pair of decent gloves would help - her last pair of cotton ones were almost beyond saving. Where on earth would they get baby clothes? she wondered. She’d given Monica and Peter’s away long ago, and the crib. They’d give you extra coupons, she thought, but how far would they go . . . ? The memory of Monica and Peter’s baby clothes suddenly made her smile. So small it scarcely seemed possible they were for a living breathing baby, not a doll. Unbidden, her hands went to circle her stomach.
Shaking her head at her own sentimentality she set the kettle on to boil and scraped the few scraps left on the plates into an enamel bowl, ready to take outside to the pig bin. Looking at the squalid leftover crusts and bits of cabbage, she found herself thinking longingly, as she did very often, of the wonderful Sunday teas they’d had before the war: tins of salmon, watercress, white bread, jam tarts and a big fruit cake . . . Catching herself, she thought that if anyone had told her that, at thirty-four, she’d find herself daydreaming of food as she’d once dreamt of romance, she’d have told them they were barmy, but there it was.
How marvellous it would be to go into a shop and get anything you fancied - money permitting, of course - with plenty to go round! And nice material to make frocks for her and Monica, and some more hand lotion, and eau de Cologne - there was only half an inch left in her little bottle of Coty, now . . . Pete needed new clothes too, he was growing so fast . . . He’d be like Ted when he grew up, she thought, tall and broad-shouldered. Amazing when he’d been such a tiny baby, only five pounds when he was born.
She transferred some more plates to the sink and stood back, wiping wisps of hair off her forehead with the back of her hand. At least she and Doris had come to a decision about Mrs Ingram. They’d speak to Dr Makepeace about finding somewhere for her to go. Then, when that was sorted out, she’d tell Ted about the baby. They’d manage somehow . . . There was a crash from somewhere down the corridor, and the sound of running. Jenny sighed. So much for no emergencies and getting off home - it was probably just children messing about, but most of the other helpers had already left, so she really ought to check. She turned off the gas under the kettle, and went towards the door. The footsteps were louder now, and she could hear shouting somewhere in the background, though not the words. Honestly, kids were so out of control these days, especially—the door flew open, crashing against the wall.
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