The inside of this drawer smells of old putty rubbers and is stained and marked, but the things it contains are clean and new: unopened rolls of Polo mints, boxes of tissues, sheets of aspirin. A few pictures of a family, smiling, in various places in Germany, have been clipped together; they must be cuttings from a magazine, though I can’t think why I’d want them. And there is a packet of lampposts, tiny lampposts with lead through the middle. The right word for them is gone, and I pick one up, trying to remember it, pressing the writing end into the wood of the drawer until the tip breaks off. It’s satisfying and I pick up another just to break it.
The doorbell rings. I drop the pencil and bang into a bookcase in my hurry to leave the room. There are two dirty cups on a shelf. I collect them and in the hall realize one has some tea in it. I drink it up, though it’s cold, and then put both cups on the bottom stair. I stumble back. The staircase is at the wrong angle. It doesn’t point at the door any more. I try a couple of steps. They’re solid enough. The doorbell rings. Twice. Three times. It’s a harsh ring, not at all tuneful. I open the door and a man bursts through.
“You really have gone too far,” he says.
He’s waving something, shaking it at me, but it moves too fast and I can’t see what it is. I back away, finding myself against the banisters. I can’t work out how they can be here. They’re in the wrong place.
“I mean. A bloody advert. It’s the fucking limit.”
“The limit,” I say, looking at the stairs. They’ve shifted and I can’t understand it.
“Yes, exactly. Hey, are you listening?”
“Do you know how the stairs moved like this?” I say.
The man is in the middle of taking a deep breath. He stops. “What?”
He’s familiar, but I don’t know him, and anyway I can’t think about him at the moment. “The stairs,” I say. “They’ve moved. They face the wrong way. How could that happen, d’you think? Has there been an earthquake or something?”
“What are you going on about?” He is very tall, this boy. But stooped, like Douglas.
“The steps,” I say. “Douglas. Douglas must have moved them.” I can’t think what I was going to say. My thoughts have got tangled somehow.
“Who’s Douglas?”
“Our lodger.”
The man seems to crouch, very slightly. “Upstairs, is he?” He puts a hand on the newel post and the banisters shake a little under his weight as he leans to peer up at the landing.
“Upstairs?” I say, following his gaze. “Who’s upstairs?” I look to the man, feeling a sudden shiver. I wonder who could be up there. Not only that, but the banisters are in the wrong place. They’re in the wrong place and I’m frightened. I study the man’s throat above his shirt collar; it is raw from shaving. This is Peter. This is Elizabeth’s son. I feel my stomach fill with anger.
“Was it you?” I say. “Was it you who moved the stairs?” That must be the explanation. “It’s exactly the kind of spiteful thing you would do.”
“Eh?” He rubs the back of his neck, frowns.
There is silence for a second. I hear a rook cawing, cawing in the distance. I am making fists of my hands. “Must have been money in it for you.”
Peter glances up at the landing again. “I haven’t moved your fucking stairs,” he hisses.
“How do you explain it then?”
“I don’t know, that’s how they were built.”
“Oh, ridiculous. What a thing to say. That sort of lie might work on your mother, but it doesn’t wash with me.”
“Shut up about my mother!” Peter shouts, raising both hands.
The front door opens behind him. It’s Helen. Helen with the heavy, honeyish smell of wisteria, and the rumble of traffic and the rustle of the orange plastic bags in her hands. These are the ones that make her grimace and feel guilty, the ones she screws up into egg-shaped balls and hides in drawers.
“What’s going on?” she says.
“This man has moved my staircase, Helen,” I say. “I think I know why he’s done it, but I don’t know how. Make him tell me how he did it.”
Peter turns to Helen. “Your mother has put an advert in the paper asking people to contact her if they’ve seen my mum.”
He thrusts a folded newspaper at her and Helen lifts the bags to show her hands are full. Katy slips through the door behind her, picking up some cups from a step. She goes into the kitchen and I wonder if she will make me some toast, but a moment later she’s back for the bags, untangling them from her mother’s fingers.
“Better hide these, huh, Mum? Don’t want anyone to know you use plastic bags.” The last two words are said in a whisper, and I wonder if Helen hasn’t heard. She doesn’t react anyway, only looks at Peter.
“An advert?” she says.
“It’s one thing calling me or leaving notes at the house. But this.”
Helen finally takes the newspaper; she glances at the folded page and then waves it at me. I try to catch it, but she isn’t looking and it misses my hand.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t know when—how—she could have put it in.”
Peter shakes his head. I start to do the same. He shakes his head as he walks out of the house, and Helen darts after him, footsteps crunching across the gravel. Her voice is raised, but I can’t make out the words. A car starts up and drives off.
“Well, that was a nice welcome home,” Helen says, coming back in. She opens the newspaper she’s carrying. “Here it is. ‘Looking for Elizabeth Markham. If you have any information please call—’ Oh, God. It’s the old house number. I didn’t know you’d placed this.”
“No. Wasn’t me,” I say.
“What made you think of doing that?” she says. “Putting an ad in the paper, I mean.”
I peer up at the landing. “‘Women. Contact your husbands,’” I say.
Helen hands me the newspaper and goes to put the kettle on.
“Contact your husbands.” I kept that article. And I gathered any stories I could find about people leaving home. Advertisements, too, men asking their wives to come back or write to them, parents hoping for news from missing sons. There weren’t really that many—the reporter had obviously overestimated for effect—but each one I found seemed to catch at me like a parachute line, my hopes winging their way into the air. I knew, of course, that even if a hundred men and women had left without a word it didn’t mean Sukey had. But it was better than the other possibility, that the murderer who had hurt those other two women had hurt Sukey, too. It meant there was a chance, that one day we might find her again. I tried asking Ma which fishmonger’s Sukey went to, but it only made her cry, and Dad was cross.
I wanted to find out what Douglas thought—after all, he always read every bit of the paper—but I was beginning to be frightened of him. I couldn’t rid myself of the image of his face, looming and angry, as he’d smeared the lipstick across my cheeks and chin, and though I’d spent hours putting cold cream on, just to wipe it off again, I still felt as if a waxy stain lingered. I started to watch him in the house, thinking about how he hadn’t seemed to grieve for his mother, and how he had stared at Sukey, and how that neighbour had said he was at Sukey’s house all the time. And I remembered the policeman saying he recognized him, and the food going missing, and the umbrella in his room that was just like the mad woman’s. And his saying he was going to the pictures and then never seeming to have seen any films. If he caught me watching he’d scowl and I would think about the film villains he looked like, but sometimes he would duck his head in that old shy way and I would think, It’s only Doug, and feel sorry for suspecting him of anything at all.
With no one to talk to, I was left to follow the meagre advice I found in the newspaper cuttings. I looked to see if there were any clues to where Sukey might have gone amongst the clothes that Frank had given me, or in the suitcase the police had returned. One man in an article had left a brochure for Torquay in a drawer, and they’d found him that way. I remembered Douglas running his hands round the lining of the suitcase, and did the same, but I didn’t find anything.
Eventually I showed the collection of cuttings to Frank when he took me back to the Fiveways. I was drinking my ginger ale, not very happy about being in a pub with him again. It was quieter, though, what with the shortage of beer, and smelled of damp rather than tobacco smoke, and Frank seemed to know fewer people now. When I showed him the papers, I had a vague idea he might cry, but he didn’t.
“So,” he said. “You think she’s left me, is that it?”
“Well, wouldn’t that be better than the alternative? What happened to that woman at the Grosvenor Hotel?”
“P’raps.”
He was staring into his beer glass, where there was only an inch of liquid left. I looked at the deep lines on his forehead, shadowed under the pub lights, and at the way his hands turned the glass, and I waited for him to finish the drink.
“You’d prefer her to be dead?” I asked, but I couldn’t believe he’d really want that, and I didn’t like saying “dead.”
His hands didn’t stop moving, the glass smoothing the skin of his fingers to whiteness, and when he looked at me it was with tired eyes.
He sighed. “No,” he said. “No, of course I wouldn’t prefer that. He’s a maniac, that man: did you read the stories through? There’s killing, that’s one thing, and there’s what he did, and that’s another.” Frank raised his hands, the last of the beer slopping about in the glass. “I mean, accidents happen, they happen and there’s nothing you can do, no way of undoing them. But what he did was no accident.”
I agreed the man was a maniac, and that his killings hadn’t been accidental, and I asked Frank again if he thought Sukey might just have gone off somewhere, but he refused to discuss it any more. He just wanted me to remember Sukey’s story, to tell him again how they first met.
“And then she said: ‘That’s the man I’m going to marry,’” I repeated, hardly having to remember at all, and watching the beer glass turning, and feeling the newspaper twisted up in my hand. “‘I just know it. He’s the man for me.’”
When Frank walked me home that night, handing me a parcel of ham for Ma and standing again at the corner to watch me go in, I saw Mrs. Winners hovering at her window. She was talking on the telephone as I went past her hedge, and she ran out after me.
“That mad woman’s been prowling about again,” she said, looking along the street. “I’ve called the constabulary, but I’d get inside quick-like, Maud.”
She noticed Frank, but you couldn’t see his face where he stood, in front of the streetlamp, his hat pulled forward.
“You courting already?” she said. “Why doesn’t he walk you home properly? Dad don’t like him?” She chuckled and pushed me on towards home. “Go on. Get inside. God knows what that woman is capable of.”
Frank was still at the corner when I looked back. I could see the lit end of his cigarette. So could Douglas.
“Been with him again,” he said, giving me a fright. He was standing in our dark front garden, looking out on the road.
“What are you doing there?” I said, annoyed.
“Your mum asked me to look out for you. The—er—that woman has been here.”
“Mrs. Winners said. I suppose you’re waiting to hand over our food.”
He nodded, not seeming to have heard me, and stayed standing in the front garden, staring down the street to the park. “Have you seen those new houses?” he asked, though he didn’t turn to me, and I wondered if it wasn’t a question for himself. “The ground was churned up for months, soil upon soil upon soil. And now it’s flat and smooth as anything. You’d never know what was under there.”
I moved closer to Douglas, expecting the smell of liquorice to breathe up from the earth, suddenly too frightened to cross the wet, shadowed garden alone, and I stared hard into the dark, trying to see what he saw. But I knew he meant the houses across the park, and there was no hope of seeing them from here, even during the day. I tried to remember what the new houses looked like, but all I could think of was the shell of Douglas’s old house with its pictures and ornaments arranged in the exposed room, as if someone might walk back in at any minute.
“People could live somewhere for a hundred years and never know what was beneath their feet,” he said. There was a rustle in the hedge and although it was probably just a hedgehog or something we both started. “You’d better go in,” he said.
I went round into the kitchen, Ma and Dad were clearing things away.
“Your dinner’s on the stove,” Ma said, not looking at me. I’d told her it was Frank I was seeing that evening, and she’d kept it from Dad. She’d also asked if Frank could get any soap or matches, because there were none in the shops. I held the package of ham up when Dad’s back was turned and her face brightened for a moment before the tired lines fell back into place.
I ate my mutton soup, expecting Douglas to come in any minute, but when I went upstairs he must still have been in the garden. I waited at my window to see him go in the kitchen door, listening to the occasional thuds of ripe apples falling from the tree, and it was nearly midnight when I finally caught sight of him, a black figure against the dark night. By then I’d finished writing to the murderer, Kenneth Lloyd Holmes.
“You smell funny,” I tell Helen as she bends to put down my tea.
“Smell funny how?” She is indignant, though I’ve hardly insulted her.
“It’s a sweet smell,” I say. “I’ll know it in a minute.” It’s sweet but it’s not pleasant. It gives me a headache and it makes me think of the mad woman; it makes me rub at my shoulder as if I’ve had a whack from an umbrella.
“Is it the tea?” Helen says, holding her own cup under my nose. “It’s fennel.”
“Ugh, yes, that’s it. How horrid. You haven’t given that to me, have you?”
“No, Mum.” She takes a sip from her mug and then grins. “I’d forgotten how much you hate the smell. You never used to let Tom and me buy liquorice allsorts when we were kids.” She pauses a moment as if this is a fond memory, though I remember her whining about it for hours when she was a child. “What are you writing?” she asks.
I look down at the paper under my hands. There are just scribbles. Lots of black scribbles on white. I can’t read them. Helen says something about Peter.
“Talk about overreacting. What does he think you’re going to do?” She pulls out a chair, scraping it along the floor, obscuring her last sentence.
I’m staring at a paper full of scribbles, meaningless scribbles. Except I have a feeling that some of them might be words and I just can’t read them. I want to ask Helen, but I’m embarrassed, frightened. When I look she is biting the inside of her cheek, staring at me. I wonder if she has guessed about the scribble-words.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll ask Elizabeth.” This seems the right thing to say. I smile at Helen for a moment, but there is something not right. I try to remember what it is. An idea keeps slipping away from me. “I can ask her, can’t I?” I look through my notes, but I don’t even have to read them. I know already. Elizabeth is missing.
I drop my pen and fold the scribble sheet up, putting it in my pocket. Helen takes my hand. She’s being nice, “making an effort.” I should, too. I wonder what I can say. “You look nice, dear.”
She makes a face.
“I am glad to have a daughter like you.”
She pats my hand and starts to get up.
“Can we go to see Patrick’s grave?” I ask. “I’d like to put some flowers on it.”
That’s done it. She smiles, widely, sitting again. She has dimples, my daughter. Still there, buried in her cheeks at fifty. I’d forgotten. It’s as if they were hiding and have finally broken out.
“We can go now,” she says.
And we get our coats on and get in the car. It’s all done in a whirl. We stop at some point, and Helen gets out. I hear the doors lock around me, see her mouth something through the glass and run off. The street isn’t busy, but the odd person walks past. I don’t recognize them, though. I don’t think I recognize them. A woman with long, dark hair turns the corner and comes towards me. She peers into the car as she goes by and stops, tapping on the window, pointing at me and then at the car door. She smiles and nods and says something I can’t quite hear through the glass. I pull at the handle, but the door won’t open, and I shake my head. The woman shrugs, waves, blows a kiss, and walks away. I wonder who she was. What she wanted.
Helen gets in suddenly, bringing a warm petrol smell with her.
“Was that Carla?” she says. “Just now?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t . . . Who did you say it was?”
“Carla.”
It’s not a name I know. Helen passes me a bunch of flowers and starts the car. “Are these for . . . that woman?” I ask. “Who did you say?”
“No, they’re for Dad.”
We pull out on to the road and I settle back, the flowers dusting me with water. I like being in the car. It’s comfortable and you don’t have to do anything. You can just sit. “Is he in hospital?”
“Who?”
“Your dad.”
We stop at a light and Helen looks at me. “Mum, we’re going to see Dad’s grave.”
“Oh, yes,” I say, and laugh. Helen frowns. “Oh, yes,” I say again.
The cemetery is huge, but it doesn’t take her long to find the grave. She must come more often than I’d realized. We stand in front of the stone. Reading it. Silently, because Helen doesn’t want me to read it aloud. We stand for a long time. I start to get tired. And it’s boring, waiting here. Helen has her head down, her hands clasped as if she’s praying. She doesn’t even believe in God. There’s a mound of earth not far from where we stand: someone’s going to be put into the soil—what do you call that? Planted, someone’s going to be planted. I stare at the earth for a long time. “Helen,” I say, “how do you grow summer squash?”
She doesn’t move, but murmurs her response. “You never stop asking that question,” she says.