‘Good at maths too!’ He made a lopsided smile, with his lips showing his teeth and cracks appeared on his face that made the marks on his cheek move.
‘It’s likely, isn’t it, that you were out of earshot, too far away to hear Alice, and she was in fact still counting, but you could not hear?’
‘No. I heard her stop while I was still on the path, I mean… while I was in my den in the hedge. I was only forty-four feet and eight and a half inches away. Sound carries that distance.’ If he never remembered anything, they could be there in the dining room forever saying the same thing. He was writing it down, but didn’t look at what he had written so it didn’t help. Eleanor could put up with it, but she knew her mother would get fed up.
‘The point is, you were able to hide, so it didn’t matter that Alice stopped counting. No need to get cross, was there?’
‘Cheating always matters.’
‘It certainly does matter. I expect that made you very angry, didn’t it?’ The Chief Inspector reached into his pocket and pulled out another bag of sweets, the paper rustled as he spilled them out on to the table between himself and Eleanor and her mother. Eleanor and Isabel stared at the pile. Isabel didn’t usually like her children buying penny sweets.
‘Have one, Eleanor. What would you like? You choose.’
‘Strawberry, please.’
‘Yes, of course it’s your favourite, you told me. Mrs Ramsay, can I tempt you?’ His eyes hovered for a moment on Isabel Ramsay, who had the looks he had never expected to meet in real life. Her mother barely shook her head. Any minute Eleanor hoped she would invent an excuse to go. It would mean they could stop, because her Dad was in Lewes and she had found out that the police couldn’t talk to her without one of her parents present. Eleanor spread the wrapping paper out into a square, neat and flat, pressing and smoothing out the folds. Suddenly her mother snatched it away and screwed it up, frowning at her.
‘You were saying how cross with Alice you were.’ He tilted back in his chair. The chairs had belonged to the Judge and they were supposed to sit sensibly in them.
‘It wasn’t fair. When she hid, I counted all the way to ten and particularly didn’t do it fast to give her time. It was easy to find her because she hid badly.’ Eleanor tucked the chew into the back of her cheek, so she could speak clearly. ‘Actually, I expect that’s why she stopped counting.’
‘What do you mean?’ The chair creaked.
‘She must have wanted to do hiding, she didn’t want to wait ages for her turn, because I’m expert at hiding, so she hid anyway. She had loads of time, because I was hiding too. She knew in the end I would look for her.’ She pushed out her lips and furrowed her forehead to deliver her diagnosis. ‘It is far more fun hiding.’
‘Don’t you think she was upset after your argument?’
‘We didn’t have an argument.’
There was silence. Her mother gazed out of the window, the backs of two fingers stroking under her chin over and over again. The next time Eleanor dared to glance at the Chief Inspector he was looking at her mother’s fingers. He caught her looking at him and started shuffling his papers, squaring the edges with sharp taps on the table.
‘All little girls have fights. I have a daughter the same age as you and she squabbles with her sister all the time. I expect you do! Changes her best friend with the weather!’
‘Gina and me do fight sometimes,’ Eleanor agreed, moving her hand so that her thumb and forefinger rested on her collarbone like her mother was doing. She tried smiling with the corners of her mouth. She hadn’t meant to say that. Her mother would be annoyed later. So would Gina.
‘You mean Alice and you fight?’ He pushed another strawberry chew towards her. It was at this point Eleanor saw that there were mostly strawberry ones. He did remember some things.
‘No, Gina. She’s my sister, not Alice.’
‘We are talking about your fights with Alice.’ He spoke like Lucian fishing out facts. Any minute he might say the Lord’s Prayer backwards in Latin without stopping.
‘We didn’t fight.’ Eleanor couldn’t say Alice was not a person you had fights with. She wanted to say she wasn’t a friend either. When Alice refused to play spaceships, Eleanor could not argue. At least with Gina there were things to say back.
It dawned on her that the Chief Inspector must know about the flower-pressing expedition. All his questions, the sweets, the smiling: everything had been to get her to talk about it. She would not.
She had been so happy when, at tea last Sunday, her Dad had announced they were all going on an expedition after they had finished eating. After only two days Eleanor was at her wit’s end with Alice and was even longing for the holiday to be over, which had never happened before. It had turned out that her Dad had been talking to Alice about her flower collection and the reason for the expedition was to find new flowers to add to it. To make things worse, Lucian and Gina were told they didn’t need to come. Eleanor had tried to get Gina’s attention: if she came Alice would be distracted, but Gina had ignored her frantic signs, probably because Eleanor had egged Lucian into doing the Dance of the Fork with her at tea. Gina had got Alice a fork for her cake then disappeared off to her room without once looking at Eleanor.
The expedition was as nightmarish as Eleanor had expected. Alice had known the names of every flower. She had flitted to and fro like a fairy, then acted like it was private as she crouched down, gripped the flower head between her fingers and confided its name in a whisper to ‘Doctor Ramsay’, as she called him, though he kept telling her she could say ‘Mark’. He then told her the Latin and helped her to pronounce it. Eleanor got crosser as he sliced the stalk with the shiny blade of his sharp knife and slipped the severed flower into a plastic folder for Alice to press.
‘Red valerian. Now I love this one, it’s sooo pretty.’ Alice said she loved every flower they found, in a tinkly voice that Eleanor hadn’t heard before.
‘Centranthus ruber.’ Her father was doing Judge Henry. He let Alice use his knife, steadying her hand as they parted the stem from the main plant. Alice was breathing in her sucking-up, wheezy way. Doctor Ramsay knew how to treat Alice like a grownup.
Eleanor snatched up a flint and threw it with all her might. It bounced down the bridleway. Alice shook her head. Her father was too busy fumbling with Alice’s flower folders to notice.
Later that night when Alice had gone home and everyone was in the living room, Eleanor had sneaked outside. The sun was going down and it was cooler. Her Dad’s study door had been left unlocked, although there was no sign of him so she had hurried in and taken a large envelope from his stationery cupboard. Then armed with her secret penknife she rampaged off down the lane in a private race, charging through the thin gap in the wheat growing in the triangular field. She savagely tore and cut whatever flowers she could find in the hedges and verges. The colours were more vivid now in the gathering twilight and were easy to find. When everyone was in bed, Eleanor sat on the floor of the playroom slapping an example of each flower into an old notebook and belting it in with a bit of sticky tape. She wrote the name in biro followed by jerky printed Latin, got from the battered Collins Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers that her Dad had left out on his desk after their outing.
‘I’ve already got a book of flowers, actually,’ she had remarked airily after Alice had been in the house about five minutes the next morning. Eleanor had meant to take the book with her to tea at Alice’s house later that afternoon when she had planned to produce it like a rabbit out of a hat, catching Alice unawares. But she couldn’t wait. As things turned out this was just as well because she wouldn’t have got a chance.