The air in the music room is still and cold. She stops in the doorway. In the darkness, the tall windows provide a panorama of the night garden. A hovacar sits on the lawn at an angle with one corner propped on the wall of the pond. Its doors are retracted and a light on its roof sends an icy beam scything through the shrubbery to cast a nightmarish web of shadows crawling over the ceiling.
‘It’s the police,’ she whispers, reading its side… She knows nothing much more about them than that their purpose is to protect. ‘Everything is all right.’
Simon is keeping quiet.
‘It is all right, isn’t it?’
I’m not sure. This is all completely new to them both. If he was really intended to be her guide, and not just an uninvited gatecrasher as she sometimes imagines, they should have made him better informed and less just opinionated.
Men in uniforms and helmets, hunched over rifles, emerge from the shrubbery onto the path and everything is now beginning to look not really all right at all.
The four-foot high mermaid, who until now has perched on a rock to provide the fountain, has been knocked over by the hova and is lying face down in the water.
Daniels lets the police into the kitchen through the outside door. He must have been asleep in his chair again – in the winter reluctant to relinquish the heat from the oven for the chill of his bed.
She listens from the music room doorway. The police think they are responding to a call but are strangely unable to say who made it. They want to speak to Matthew, but Daniels explains that he is poorly and asleep and reminds them tersely that it is not even dawn. He invites them to return in the morning. Despite their bold manner of arrival, he seems to have the better of them as if they know that their credentials are weak, but they will still not leave without a room-by-room check – ‘Just to make sure everything is all right’.
‘What are you checking for?’ Daniels asks. Even through the wall, she can hear his anxiety.
‘Intruders,’ the policeman replies flatly.
‘Intruders? What intruders? There aren’t any intruders.’
‘From the streets.’
‘From the streets? How could anyone have got in here from the streets? We’re thirty-five storeys up.’
‘They get in everywhere. How many live here?’
‘Just Mr Davenport, myself and… Evie.’ She picks up on his hesitancy to include her. Maybe for police purposes she doesn’t really count.
While they continue to speak, the kitchen door opens and a pair of the black jackets crowd their way down the hall. The elbow of one brushes right through the Tibetan vase, causing it to vanish and re-emerge upside down and flat, as if printed on the wall.
‘Who is Evie?’ The conversation in the kitchen continues.
‘She’s a relation of Mr Davenport.’
Evie slips away from the music room door and looks around urgently but there is nowhere here for her to hide.
The policeman enters. His rifle is wedged into his shoulder as if he may have to at any moment shoot.
On seeing her he comes to a stop. The gun barrel is tilted down at her and only inches from the daisy chain embroidery stitched across the chest of her nightdress.
What do I do? she asks Simon, petrified.
Act normal. If you can.
‘Miss?’ the policeman says, his voice, buried behind the chin of his helmet, amplified by a helmet speaker. He slants the gun away. ‘Everything all right here?’
Just – act – normal, Simon repeats, giving each word emphasis.
‘Yes,’ she murmurs, unable to look at him directly. Terrified like this, she is ironically at her most human.
He gazes down at her. The blue light from the cruiser parked in the garden strobes the tinted visor of his helmet, revealing for a second a pair of blood-shot eyes. A red dot pulses on the camera attached to his shoulder padding. The lens pans the room, whirring at speed past her, then sluggishly returning to settle on her face where it hovers without blinking, filming her staring eyes.
5
The police come again the following morning as promised. This time they arrive by the elevator and there are just the two of them. Evie has been told to stay out of sight, which is fine as she is still shaken by the night’s events. She listens through her door as they are admitted into the hall by Daniels and led to the library. She can hear the effort in his voice to be courteous.
‘What an amazing space,’ one of them says, a woman, on observing the garden through the window from the doorway. ‘I heard about it from the guys who came earlier, but without seeing it for yourself, you’d not believe that something like this could exist anywhere any more, let alone all the way up here. As she enters the room, she gasps again, taking in the double-height space with the ornate circular skylight. ‘It’s like a stately home in the sky.’
Evie hears Daniels take in a tray of coffee – she can smell also that he has made pastries, trying to win them over big-time. ‘Oh, no sign of austerity here I see,’ the woman says loudly. Evie can almost feel him wince every time the woman opens her mouth and he shuts the library door behind him with an irritated thump.
After another half hour, Daniels comes to her room. ‘Evie,’ he says, ‘they want to speak to you.’ He sounds apprehensive and immediately she becomes so herself. ‘They say they just want to ask you some questions about what you may have seen. If it comes up, you must answer that you are Mr Davenport’s niece.’
‘Why?’ she asks.
‘Because that is what he told them.’
‘Why did he do that?’ She is sensitive about being denied – what Simon, knowing how to push her buttons, refers to mischievously as her ‘Evelyn complex’.
‘He was trying to make things easier for them to understand. He said that you came here as a small child after his sister died, so there’s not much that they can quiz you about that they don’t already have an answer for.’
Maybe there isn’t, she thinks, but why such a complicated set of lies? She is nervous that they want to interview her – no one has ever done that – but even more so she is uncomfortable about not telling the truth.
‘You okay?’ Daniels asks.
‘I’m all right,’ she says, trying to bury her unease. She involuntarily touches the ribbon in her hair, to make sure it is still in place, and glances down at the old skirt and blouse under an ancient cardigan with darned elbows she is wearing and then below that at her black woollen stockings with holes in the toes.
‘Maybe some shoes are in order,’ he says gently, as if her lack of footwear is the most she has to be concerned about. She can tell that, underneath, he is worried that she will not be able to get this story her husband has concocted right.
You’re going to mess this up, Simon says as they cross the hall. You’ve never been able to act and they’re completely wrong to put us in this situation.
‘I will not mess up,’ she whispers back, but wishes she could believe it to be so. The combination of their lack of assurance, his and Daniels’s, is devouring her confidence.
The library, with its view of the garden, is filled with morning light. Matthew sits in his chair in the corner, the one beneath the lamp that he uses for reading. He appears stronger today and has dressed for the meeting in a tweed suit with a cream shirt and a woven tie. Attired like this, he could be the landowner of a country estate. However, the shirt is an old one and the neck is too wide, giving him the appearance of a man who has shrunk while still trying to preserve his dignity. He smiles at her oddly as she enters. He is as anxious about her as the others. They all think I’m going to let them down, she thinks.