Silent Children Read online

  "They broke in at the back, and what they did is upstairs."

  "Are you saying they because you think you can identify the perpetrators?"

  "No, I'm saying it because I don't."

  His gaze flickered at that, then raised itself above her. "I'll deal with upstairs."

  He was speaking mostly to his colleague, who headed for the kitchen. "Good excuse for staying up late, is it, son?" Leslie heard him say, and Ian barely answer, while blue-eyes halted on the stairs. "This is about your house," he said.

  Leslie saw the graffiti swell up like red weals on the wood. KILLER LOVER, they said on her door, and KILLERS FRIEND on Ian's. The wielder of the aerosol must have run out of ideas or paint or time in front of Jack's door, on which there was either too much of a word—KILLE—or not enough. A sudden prickling of her eyes made her blurt "Why, do you think it should be?"

  "It's not my job to have opinions like that, Mrs. Ames."

  There was little doubt in Leslie's mind that he meant yes. She was struggling not to retort when he said "Were these doors open?"

  "No," Leslie admitted, the paint on the carpet having betrayed as much. "We needed to look in the rooms."

  "Pity. Knobs are favourite for prints," he said, surveying the chaos in the rooms—not so different from usual in Ian's, but clothes strewn on her floor and Jack's, drawers pulled out, wardrobes gaping, quilts thrown or kicked to the floor. "Have you missed anything?"

  "Nothing's been taken that we can see, can't see, if you see what I mean."

  "Let's see if there's any joy downstairs."

  She trudged after him in time to hear his colleague say "And where are you from, sir?"

  "Hollywood," Ian responded with some pride on Jack's behalf.

  "Does this look like a professional job to you?" Jack said.

  "In what way, sir?"

  Jack was indicating the old sink plunger that had apparently been used to hold the pane in the back door steady while the edge of the glass had been carefully smashed. "More likely they got the idea from a film," the policeman said with a brown-eyed glance at him, so blank it was meaningful.

  "I'll do the paperwork if you want to take a look around," his colleague said and sat on a kitchen bench.

  He asked Leslie questions about herself and Ian followed by questions about Jack while the other policeman prowled the back garden toward the alley gate Leslie'd locked last night, no longer locked. Before the questions ceased she was having to close her eyes, because the floor kept twitching like a sheet about to be thrown off a sleeper. She could have imagined the night was half over when she heard "Was there anything you'd like to add?"

  It was a mutter from Ian, not quite a word, that made her open her eyes. "Sorry," she said for more than one reason. "No."

  "We'll get out of your way," the other policeman offered, locking the door with her key and lifting the sink plunger in a plastic bag, and then the doorbell contradicted him. "That'll be fingers," he said.

  The newcomer was a short man in a grey suit rather too ample for him. His freckled dome was striped with half a dozen lines of faded black hair. His expression as he spread dust on various surfaces suggested that he was unable to shift an unpleasant taste from his mouth. He seemed especially to dislike being watched at work by Ian, though Leslie didn't see why he should object to someone following him around their own house and into their own bedroom. Eventually the fingerprint man tramped downstairs, looking dissatisfied. "Are you through?" Jack said.

  The man sucked in his lips as if he'd swallowed some of the dust. "We'll want your prints."

  At first Leslie thought only Jack was going to be fingerprinted, presumably for being a foreigner. Once that was finished it was Ian's turn, however, and then hers to be made to feel like a criminal, having ink rolled onto her fingertips before they were pressed one by one against an official sheet of paper. By the time the last of her fingers had been pinched in his finicky grip she felt manhandled and grubby. As she held her blackened hands away from herself Jack said "That's going to help, right? You had to eliminate us."

  "I doubt that'll be called for."

  "By which you mean ..." Leslie prompted.

  He didn't answer until he'd snapped the locks shut on his briefcase. "Anyone who takes that much care breaking in isn't likely to leave prints."

  Leslie felt more than ever like a victim, and not just of the break-in. She let Jack and Ian see him out while she used a nailbrush in the bathroom, then hurried downstairs to clear away the broken glass, only to find Jack busy with dustpan and brush, and Ian on his hands and knees in search of stray fragments. "Can you get the window fixed tonight?" Jack said.

  "It'll wait until tomorrow so long as nobody can get in."

  He helped her upend the table against the door and wedge it with the benches. She switched off the fluorescent tube, though a trace of its glare appeared to linger in the concrete, and led the way upstairs, bracing herself for the sight of the raw words on the doors. "I should try and get some sleep, Ian," she said. "You'll have all tomorrow to tidy your room."

  Perhaps that sounded too much like her frequent rebuke. "Won't need it," he muttered.

  "Will it bother anybody if I make a start on my room now?" Jack said. "Just thump on the wall if I keep you awake."

  Once Leslie had closed her door she had to restrain herself to tidying only the bed. She lay naked beneath the quilt, all her skin tender with her sense of the invasion of the house. Every so often she heard faint sounds through the wall she shared with Jack, the metallic whisper of a coat hanger, the hushed creak of a board. She found herself waiting at the edge of sleep for a cry that would mean he'd discovered his research or however much of his new book he'd written had been tampered with or destroyed. But his room stayed almost as quiet as the suburb, and eventually she deduced that he must have crept into bed.

  For the first time in months she felt alone in hers. She stretched one arm across the mattress and turned her empty hand palm upward, and squeezed a fistful of the quilt. The thoughts she began to entertain, if a little guiltily, resembled a better dream than she would have expected of herself just now, and in time her awareness of being less alone in the house than yesterday allowed her to sleep.

  She was wakened by smells of coffee and bacon and toast, and Jack's and Ian's voices downstairs. All that made the sight of the sunlit mess around the bed more bearable than she would have dared hope, and she was letting herself bask for a few seconds in a sense of unexpected rightness, when it occurred to her that the kitchen staff might be planning to serve her breakfast in bed. She kicked off the quilt and grabbed her bathrobe from the hook on the door, and was tying the cord around herself when the doorbell rang. "I'll get it," Jack said.

  She heard his footsteps, which already seemed part of the house, tramp along the hall. She heard the front door open, and Jack's surprised voice, and then Ian's. "Don't let her in," he shouted.

  SIXTEEN

  Ian had almost finished cramming socks and shorts into the top drawer when he heard Jack go downstairs. He would have called out to him except for not wanting to wake his mother. She must be the worst upset of anyone about last night, and she was getting old—she'd be forty in just a few years. He leaned his weight on the stuffed drawer to close it, then he went down to find Jack.

  He was in the kitchen doorway, gazing into the room. He didn't notice when Ian paced along the hall and stared past him. "What's wrong?" Ian said.

  "God damn." That was all the surprise Jack betrayed as he turned to grin. "I thought I'd fix breakfast for your mom after her evening was ruined. Just trying to decide what to put together for her."

  "Oh, right," Ian said, though it was evident to him that Jack's thoughts had been on more than breakfast—he guessed, with some amusement he managed to keep to himself, that they had been focused on his mother. "Want some help?"

  "How are you at scrambling eggs?"

  "Don't know."

  "Better leave the little guys to me, then,
and you can be the toast and bacon chef."

  "No problemo," Ian said, which he thought was the kind of thing Americans said or liked to hear.

  As he laid rashers of bacon on the grill and tried to judge how crisp they ought to be before they were joined by slices of bread, he felt increasingly American himself, a cook in a diner. He liked having someone new in the house whom he could sense there was plenty to learn about yet, unlike his father, who had become less and less of himself in the months before he and Ian's mother had split up, and whose efforts to regain himself since he'd moved in with Hilene were too obvious and strenuous. Ian no longer resented him so much for having moved out—could even be grateful to him for taking the tension out of the house. If Ian's mother carried on growing happier, that was fine too—would have been if last night hadn't been wrecked. Was he alone in having identified the culprit? Once he'd discharged his duties as short order cook he meant to ask if Jack had solved the case too. But he was standing guard over the last slices of toast when the doorbell rang.

  "I'll get it," Jack said, so swiftly that Ian supposed he must be expecting some post—some mail, as he determined to call it from now on. He watched Jack transfer the scrambled eggs in a single uninterrupted movement from the pan to the plate with a spatula and slide the plate into the oven on the way to consigning pan and spatula to the sink as a preamble to striding down the hall to open the front door. "Excuse me," he said, adding with a brightness that seemed meant to apologise for his apology "Hi. Are you looking for Mrs. Ames?"

  "Whom else?"

  Ian recognised both the voice and the grammar before he saw the reporter from the Advertiser sitting in her wheelchair on the path. "Don't let her in," he shouted, imagining how little his mother would want to find her in the house.

  The reporter scarcely even blinked at him on the way to raising her appraisal to Jack's face. "And you'll be..."

  "Jack Lamb. I'm the lodger. How about you?"

  Ian heard his mother's footsteps, anything but gentle, and the thud of her doorknob against the wall. He grabbed a plate and loaded it with the contents of the grill and shut the plate in the oven as his mother marched rapidly downstairs to confront the reporter, who said "I represent the press" and then "I understand you've had some further trouble, Mrs. Ames."

  "May I ask who told you that?"

  "An anonymous call to the paper. My colleague who took it thought the voice was disguised and couldn't tell the age or gender."

  "When?"

  "Close to midnight, I believe. It was thought best not to trouble you that late."

  "And what did your friend say?"

  "My colleague? The caller. Just that your house had been broken into and vandalised as a result of its reputation."

  " 'The Ames house has been broken into and vandalised as a result of its reputation.' "

  "Words to that effect," the reporter said blankly, "yes."

  "Well, they were right, and you don't need me to tell you it must have been one of your readers, except of course it might have been more than one."

  "Mrs. Ames," the reporter said, though she was looking at Jack, "I really don't think you can blame—"

  "Can't I? Watch me." Ian's mother darted into the front room to fetch a copy of the Advertiser. "I ought to introduce you, Jack. This is Verity Drew, and here's the kind of thing she writes: MOTHER AND SON TO STAY IN MURDER HOUSE. Mrs. Ames claimed she had overcome her feelings about the house's history of horror, and her thirteen-year-old son agreed with her. 'It's my favourite house' is something else it says I said."

  "I assure you I'm not given to misquotation, Mrs. Ames, but if you have any specific complaints you'd care to put in writing to my editor—"

  "I'd rather not join your happy band of letter-writers, thanks. I'd just like you to see what someone did, only you can't, can you? It's upstairs."

  She would never have made such a remark if she wasn't almost uncontrollably furious. Whatever reaction the journalist might have displayed was precluded by the slam of a door of a car that had parked behind hers. She peered around her chair as a man festooned with camera equipment opened the gate. "Perhaps you'll permit my photographer to view the scene instead."

  "He won't be scared to come in? He won't be tainted by his visit? He can wait until I'm dressed." Ian's mother held the lapels of her shaggy white bathrobe together as she padded upstairs, then she leaned over the banisters. "No, someone bring him up if he wants a picture of the doors. I've said enough."

  "Let me," Jack called, and climbed the stairs ahead of the photographer. "No need to have me in it," he protested when the camera began to whir and click, and Ian wished he'd gone up instead of Jack, because he wouldn't have minded being shown as the custodian of the graffiti. The photographer scampered downstairs with a rattle of equipment and out of the house, and Verity Drew gazed up at Ian and Jack. "One further matter I'd like to raise," she said.

  "Would you care to come in and sit down?" Jack suggested.

  "Sitting in the sunlight suits me, thank you. I understand some little girls have been terrorised here recently."

  Though she'd turned most of her attention on Ian, it was Jack who said "Did you get another anonymous call?"

  "You wouldn't expect us to dismiss anybody's genuine concern just because of how it might be expressed," the reporter informed him, and stared wholly at Ian. "What can you tell me about these little girls?"

  "Excuse me, I think at least you'd better wait—"

  "It's okay, Jack, I don't mind telling. One was my dad's girlfriend's who got scared when he came in the house, and the other was my friend's little sister. She did come in with me and our lot, then she got scared and ran off."

  "Scared of what exactly?"

  "We were pretending there was a ghost or something." He was growing increasingly conscious of being heard by Jack. "We never thought there was really," he said, struggling not to lie in case that made Jack more rather than less dissatisfied with him, "and I dunno if she did either."

  "You quite enjoyed the game, did you?"

  "Suppose."

  "Frightening people younger than yourself."

  "Hold on, ma'am, don't try to make him into something he isn't. Didn't you ever throw a scare into a younger kid? Sounds as if maybe it got a tad out of hand, but he's sorry for it. I shouldn't think an incident as small as that is worth reporting even in a local paper."

  "May I ask why you would want it suppressed, Mr. Lamb?"

  "I don't hold with censorship. I couldn't very well when I've written horror books. I just think these guys have been harassed enough."

  "Are you suggesting I'm harassing them?"

  "If he's not," Ian's mother said, "I am."

  She was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, and Ian had to straighten a grin at Jack's admiring glance as she moved between him and the reporter, saying "I apologise for what I said about not being able to handle the stairs."

  "I accept your apology," Verity Drew said stiff-faced.

  "But now we've had enough of you. I don't think there's anything more to be said."

  "Well, Mrs. Ames, I must say it's a change for you to want to keep me out of your house. As I recall, last time you and your son did your best to keep me in it."

  "Then your memory wants fixing. All I did was try and help you down the step because you seemed to need help."

  "You'll forgive my wondering what policy you have as regards the alternatively able where you work."

  "Anyone can come into the shop straight off the pavement, can't they, Jack, only you'd call it the sidewalk. As far as employment goes there's just me and my partner Melinda, and we're both, how can I put it, what you see."

  "I've seen all I require, thank you," the reporter said, and performed a rapid three-point turn on the path before glancing back. Ian was tempted to run after her and at least push her out of the gate, and he'd taken a step when his mother planted a hand on his chest as she closed the door. "We can't stop her saying whatever she's going to say. Maybe
her editor won't let her indulge herself too much."

  "She'll get round that. She knows how to say things so you can't prove she did."

  "Not like us straightforward Yanks." Observing that his remark made Ian no happier, Jack said "There's one good thing about all this publicity."

  "What?"

  "Yes, what's that?" Ian's mother said.

  "It—it finishes. It ends. Mine surely did for my books. Say, am I the only one that's hungry here? That breakfast smells like it wants to be eaten."

  "I think that's the best idea anybody's had this morning."

  Ian thought he had a better one that it was time to share. He waited until he and Jack had served his mother breakfast and he was seated in front of his own, his bare feet resting on concrete almost as warm as sunlit earth, and then he said "If she's going to write stuff about us we should have told her who messed up the place."

  His mother opened her mouth before she'd quite finished her mouthful. "Why, who do you think it was?"

  "Mom, I mean mum, you saw him. You know who it's got to be, don't you, Jack?"

  "You mean the guy we saw last night near the restaurant?"

  "That's him. Rupe Duke. Did you know it was before I said? You could have told the paper woman. She'd have believed you more than me."

  "I only figured he was who you had to mean. I guess I'd need more evidence before I shot my mouth off."

  "And there isn't any, is there, Ian? We can't go accusing someone just because of how they looked at us. I'm afraid on that basis it could have been a good few people."

  "We don't have any reason to assume that lady would have bought it from an old storyteller like me," Jack said, and loaded his mouth.

  "If you wanted to be really helpful, Ian, you could go down to the shops after breakfast and buy something to clean off the paint while I see who'll fix the window, and then I'll go to work."

  He took this as a way of dismissing his suspicions, though he thought Jack might have believed him. Once he'd downed his breakfast and offered to wash up, only to have Jack say he would, he pocketed the money his mother gave him and went upstairs to fish some footwear out of the disorder in his room. From the hall he saw Jack and his mother at the sink, standing so close to each other they were bound to touch soon. He grinned and let himself out of the house.