Sometimes it would take days to clean a place. Then the painters would come in, the plasterers to fix holes in the internal walls (fists? boots? heads?), the locksmith, the carpet layer. Big, contemptuous guys, usually, who couldn’t see why the shire would want to prettify a house just so another lot of crazies, addicts, immigrants and no-hopers could have somewhere nice to live. What was the point? Eddie sympathised with this view, while trying not to think of the conditions that his parents had lived in before they settled in the lucky country.
De Soto Lane lay at the forgotten end of the little township of Warrawee, ten kilometres northeast of Penzance Beach. Eddie and the guys parked the van outside number 24, a small brick-veneer house set well back from the road among blackberry canes and rusting cars lost in chest-high spring grasses. A timber yard sat on one side of it, behind a high cyclone fence. Behind it was a market gardener’s packing shed. Opposite was a stand of tall pines, black cockatoos clinging to the top branches and squawking softly as they cracked cones with their powerful beaks. Amid the pine trees was a small brick house with drawn curtains. An old woman was pottering about in her garden. Otherwise the lane was sparsely populated, with the only other visible house a new but ugly McMansion, two storeys, red tiles, four-car garage, lots of off-white pillars and columns, a vast landscaped garden under construction. The market gardener lived there, Eddie guessed, or would live there soon, for there were heaps of soil and bricks lying around.
He shivered. He’d hate to live out here. He’d seen from the street directory that there was a Cadillac Court, a Mercedes Terrace, and a Buick Drive. Did they make De Soto cars any more? He didn’t think so. He’d asked the other guys, but they didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
Eddie assessed number 24 rapidly that Monday afternoon. 1960s vintage, with only a handful of small, low-ceilinged rooms: living room, kitchen, laundry, bathroom, hallway and two bedrooms. He knew this at a glance. He’d cleaned dozens like it. The lawn needed mowing, he noticed, weeds thrived in the garden beds, scaly mould patches covered the roof tiles. He sniffed experimentally as he approached the front door. Often you could assess the size of the job within by the stench factor.
Nothing discernible.
Eddie went in first.
No furniture, no crud lying about. There was dust, sure, scuffs on the walls, but the place wasn’t too bad. The carpet would need a shampoo, but that’s all. The smudges would come off the walls okay. With any luck, they could be out of here by lunchtime tomorrow. Eddie made these assessments as he walked from the front door to the sitting room.
Then he heard a whimper and his skin crept. The other guys went round-eyed and took a step back involuntarily.
‘Anyone there?’ Eddie called, being the boss.
That whimper again. With a hammering heart, Eddie approached the room that in most of these houses was the smaller bedroom. He tried the door; it was locked. He rapped his knuckles. ‘Anyone home?’
More whimpering. Eddie figured it could be passed off as damage caused by the previous occupants if he forced the door, so he went out to the van and returned with a crowbar and splintered the door away from the jamb.
The stench was shocking. She was naked and afraid and lying in her own wastes. She scrabbled away from him on a mattress in a room decorated as a nursery, one wrist tethered to a hook in the wall. Eddie was nominally a Catholic; he crossed himself. ‘Little girl, little girl,’ he cooed, the other guys coming in behind him then, hovering at his elbow. Who knew the trials, heartaches and torture they had experienced and witnessed in their own countries? Yet they rushed past him with distressed and comforting cries and gathered her up.
20
Challis spent the day chatting with his father, reading aloud from Mr Midshipman Hornblower, and preparing simple meals. His childhood home seemed smaller than he’d remembered; stuffier, older, less well cared for. Since his mother’s death, his father had lost the will to be house-proud. Had nothing to live for, in fact. It was sad; it broke Challis’s heart. He wanted to make things better. He wanted to run away.
‘Cup of tea, Dad?’ he said at four o’clock, the afternoon sun angling into the back room, lighting the dust motes.
His father reached his right hand across his stomach and pulled his left into view. He examined his wristwatch for a while-as if time had now become a puzzle, where once it had ruled his life.
‘I’d like to eat at five, five-thirty.’
Challis said nothing. At five-twenty he’d microwave the chicken soup that Meg had left in the fridge, grill a lamb chop, boil half a carrot, and add a lettuce leaf and a slice of tomato. Would he himself eat at five-thirty? Yes, to be companionable. Besides, being a policeman had accustomed him to snatching dinner at all hours of the night and day. He was adaptable.
But the evening would be long. TV reception was poor this far north. A couple of his mother’s opera and ballet videos in the cabinet under the TV set, a short shelf of CDs: light classics, mostly, The Seekers, Welsh male choirs. He couldn’t go to the pub and leave his father alone. It was too soon to ask friends around-and what friends, anyway?
There was his laptop. Work on the discussion paper on regional policing that he still hadn’t written for Superintendent McQuarrie? Play solitaire? Somehow use the Web to find Gavin Hurst?
Actually, there was one thing he could do. He’d been restoring an old aeroplane before things had got so complicated in his life. It was gathering dust in a hangar on the little regional airport near Waterloo, and he knew, as one did know these things, that his not completing the restoration was symptomatic of a malaise, of a life that marked time, that waited when it should act. He’d feel better about himself if he went on-line and searched for missing parts-instrument-panel switches, for example.
The doorbell chimed, the sound bringing back vivid memories of his childhood, when friends had visited this house. The feeling strengthened as Challis made his way along the passageway to the front door, past his mother’s framed tapestries of English rural scenes, thatched cottages and haystacks, past the upended shell casing from the Second World War, now crammed with walking sticks and umbrellas.
And continued when he saw Rob Minchin on the doorstep.
‘Hal, old son.’
‘Rob.’
They shook hands, then embraced awkwardly. ‘How’s my patient?’
‘Cranky.’
‘Unchanged, in other words.’
Like Challis, Minchin had gone away, trained, and returned to the town. Unlike Challis, he’d stayed. He was the only doctor in the district, run ragged by surgery consultations, hospital rounds and house calls. He travelled huge distances, attending home births on remote farms, talking through the anxieties of lonely widows, taking the temperatures of sick children, pronouncing death when stockmen ran their mustering bikes into gullies and broke their necks. He was also the on-call pathologist for the region.