You close your eyes and let the water go over you. It won’t hurt. It’s better that you can’t swim, you die quicker. Sailors don’t learn to swim in case their boat sinks, Luke said.
‘Let’s hurry this along, shall we, Eleanor?’ The chin came closer; unlike the ‘Stricken Senator’s Chin’ it was full of holes and a funny pink colour. ‘Where have you hidden Alice?’
‘It’s not amusing, darling.’ Isabel glared at Eleanor. ‘You’re not normally like this.’ Isabel smiled hopelessly at the Chief Inspector. It was obvious that Eleanor was normally like it.
‘He said where had I hidden…’
‘Be quiet!’ Isabel grabbed her by the shoulder, pinching her skin under her shirt, pushing her sharply away and then yanking her closer, so that Eleanor nearly toppled from her chair. ‘Just answer Chief Inspector Hall’s questions properly. For the last time: this is no time for fun and games.’
Eleanor felt tears well up, like an enemy stalking. She was frightened of the woman with the tin voice and jabbing fingers and now she was frightened of the policeman with the red sweets and the red chin. He had stopped smiling.
‘When did you last see Alice?’ He had no idea he had asked things before. Eleanor decided that if it was a game she could pretend. She relaxed.
She told the story of the last day. She made the snap decision to put Alice outside the blacksmith’s, which was now a garage, at the bend in the lane leading to the White House. Eleanor told only of the first game of hide and seek which they had played in the village on the Sunday afternoon before tea. She pretended they had played it on that last Tuesday afternoon. She could not say the second game had been at the Tide Mills as they shouldn’t have been there and although Alice had agreed to come, it had been Eleanor’s idea.
It was best not to mention the Tide Mills at all. Eleanor wasn’t going to allow Alice to spoil anything.
The detective’s face was a gritty mask, as Eleanor elaborately outlined how she had hidden in her den on the edge of the ten-acre field behind the old blacksmith’s. It was a secret place that Eleanor didn’t think Alice knew about. If Alice had been in the room she would have said Eleanor was lying and told him they were at the Tide Mills not in the village.
‘You know we have to tell, don’t you.’
She would say the game in the village had been on the Sunday and give them accurate times and dates. Alice would have confessed the truth even if it got Eleanor into trouble. She would simper and whimper about how their feet had slipped on the bridge over the millpond and they had nearly drowned. She would say how Eleanor forced her to walk along the crumbling arch over the gigantic wheel underneath. Alice would pop a strawberry sweet between her moist lips and, being allowed to smile, she would assure him that honestly, she had asked Eleanor not to walk there, but Eleanor had forced her to.
It was very good, concluded Eleanor, that Alice was not there.
She did tell the policeman about her special trick, but was annoyed when he wrote it down because it was a secret. It wasn’t cheating. She explained how she spied on the person looking, and once they had checked one hiding place and found no one there, she would choose her moment and rush over to hide in it. This way Eleanor could be hiding for days if she wanted to.
She had not done this on Sunday.
Richard Hall noted down that Eleanor Ramsay talked like a boy as she boasted about taking apart dead animals and vaulting across furrows in the triangular field with an old farm cart in one corner. Once she reached the other side she said she had turned back to see if Alice was following her. Chief Inspector Hall prided himself on his ability to be objective, but in this case he was not. He didn’t like this child; she wasn’t a proper girl or a proper boy. He vaguely blamed it on the mother who was very attractive.
Eleanor did not mention that Alice had cheated in the first game because now she was pretending to the policeman that there had been only one game. In the first game Alice had sneaked a look while she was counting. She did tell him how on the last day Alice had stopped counting too soon.
Eleanor soon found the talks with the policeman boring. So must he, for on the Thursday morning he had suggested they go out and that Eleanor take him to her hiding places. A gang of tall men loped after the diminutive expedition leader, as she marched them up the lane, and showed them her den through a hole in the hedge of the triangular field. She stood back proudly, arms folded as, one by one, they stuck heads into the gap and made ‘Ah-yes’ noises. In a burst of inspiration she took them to the very petrol pump she had told them Alice had been standing next to when she last saw her. By now Eleanor had forgotten she wasn’t telling the truth and waited with hands on hips, while the police measured the exact distance between the spot where Alice had supposedly been standing and the gap in the hedge that led to the hiding place with a wheel on a stick. It was forty-four feet and eight and a half inches. Eleanor had done measuring in the playground, and knew how many inches to a foot and how many yards to a mile if they asked.
Richard had marks on his cheeks like a potato. Eleanor addressed these marks when she answered the question about hearing a car while hiding in the hedge. Patiently she reminded him that she had swapped hiding places so was not hiding in the hedge the whole time. Later she wished she had put in a car. She could have used the one with silver hubcaps that she saw driving on the Thames by the Hammersmith yacht club. She had thought it was a dream until Lucian talked about the car that could go on water one breakfast time. She made up her mind that if Richard asked her about a car again, she would grab the chance to tell him about it.
By Friday, Eleanor had grown used to the questions and could answer them promptly and consistently.
‘Why did Alice stop counting?’
‘To find me sooner.’
‘Is that what you do?’
‘No, it’s cheating.’
‘Where were you when she stopped counting?’
‘Hiding in the bushes.’
‘What bushes?’
There were no bushes in the triangular field or on the footpath. The bushes were by the Mill. But he accidentally helped her:
‘Do you mean the hedge?’
‘Yes. I ran very fast across the field and down the zig-zag path to the beach. In the opposite direction to the Mill.’ She drew breath and grinned inadvertently. She lost two lives if he guessed about the Tide Mills.
‘Why wasn’t it fair to stop counting?’
‘There was no time to hide. If I hadn’t known exactly where to go, I would have been cross.’
‘So you were cross with Alice.’ He was friendly again.
‘No, I didn’t ’specially mind. Except I didn’t have time to hide.’
‘But you did hide.’
‘Not properly. If I hadn’t known about my den…’ By now Eleanor knew for certain he had something wrong with his memory. She had a game called Memory that Alice had agreed to play. Each person had to turn up two cards in a go and hope to remember where the other part of a pair was. Alice always knew and always won. When she had gone Eleanor found faint pencil squiggles on the backs of the cards.
‘How far did Alice count before she stopped?’
‘Five.’ He wasn’t listening. Eleanor doubted that anyone ever told him off.
‘You recall exactly. That’s smart.’
‘It was meant to be ten, she stopped halfway.’