Freeing Grace (26 page)

‘Okay.’ I pushed myself to my feet. ‘Thanks for the drink.’

‘Not at all. Any time. Thanks for your company.’

So I left him there, alone with his empty bottle, and sloped upstairs.

Mad
, I thought, as I snuggled my head into the pillow and let the soft mists of Jura carry me away.
They’re all mad
.

Chapter Nineteen

I didn’t hear the creak of my door a few hours later. I never heard her cross the floor, either, or lower a mug down next to the alarm clock.

‘Jake.’ Fingers gently pinched my ear. ‘Jake.’

Deborah was standing beside the bed, bright against the pale light of an autumn morning. She was dressed in proper clothes, I noticed: corduroy trousers and a posh, moss-coloured jersey. Proper pommy clothes, to go with the potpourri and polished floors. I missed the strips of tie-dyed cloth.

I peered at the clock, whisky-headed. ‘Jeez!’ I croaked. ‘Half past seven! What is this? Boot camp? I could be snuggled down in a hotel room right now, with fluffy towels and
Do not disturb
hanging on the door.’

‘Sorry. I brought you some tea.’

Her voice was clear as water. I felt grubby with her so close to me. I mumbled a vague thanks and reached for the mug—I don’t touch the stuff, actually—and she sat down on the bed, somewhere near my knees. I could faintly smell her perfume. A warm, citrus scent, and maybe cloves.

I took a mouthful of tea, hoping it would scald the cotton wool off my tongue. ‘Is anyone else up?’

‘Lucy left two hours ago,’ she said absently, staring out of the window. ‘She says she’ll phone you.’

I stretched my legs, smugly. ‘She’ll be at her desk by now.’

‘I was hoping . . .’

‘Yeah? Faithful hound, at your service.’

‘I . . . um. I’d be so grateful if you could come with me this morning.’

I was suspicious. ‘Come with you to
where
?’

‘Children’s Services. Fintan House. I’ve got to beard the dragons in their lair.’

‘Well, I don’t see what I’ve got to do with any of that. It’s Perry you . . .’ I wavered, remembering. ‘It’s a solicitor you need.’

She nodded. ‘Stuart Forsyth. I’ve got an appointment to see him tomorrow. In the meantime, his advice is to get down to Fintan House and throw my hat into the ring.’

‘Okay. Fine. Good luck.’ I plonked my head back onto the pillow. The linen smelled of lavender. ‘Let me know how you get on.’

‘Perry can’t come with me this morning. He’s busy.’

What a whopper.

She reached down and shook me by the knee. ‘He explained the whole legal thing to me last night . . . are you listening, Jake?’

‘Nope.’ I pulled the pillow over my ears, wishing I’d put a thousand miles between myself and this madhouse.

She dragged it off me, sat with it on her lap. ‘Grace is being cared for by the local authority, but they have to restore her to her birth family if at all possible. That’s their duty. Adoption is a last resort.’

‘You’d hope so.’

‘Quite. Well, they’ve tried, to be fair. Cherie died. Matt couldn’t manage alone. Perry never came to the party. They didn’t believe I existed, so they gave up and planned to have Grace adopted. They’ve even found a family.’

‘Fast work!’ I said. ‘The thing’s on the home straight.’

‘Okay. Well, because Matt won’t give consent, they’ve had to apply to court for an order. Without it, they’re scuppered.’

‘What if they
do
get their order?’

‘It more or less casts her adrift. She’ll go to the new family without any legal baggage. They call it a placement hearing. Nice, anodyne words, aren’t they? Apparently it used to be called the freeing, because the child is cut free from her unreasonable, grasping parents.’ Deborah laughed bitterly. ‘An arresting idea: as though some judge could set a person free. I wish it was so easy. I’d apply for one myself.’

I ignored this stream of consciousness. It was too early in the morning. ‘Sounds as though they’ve got everything nicely teed up,’ I said.

‘Mm. Well, they had until I appeared, like a bad penny. So now I’ve got to rush over there and show that I really do exist, and have only one head.’

I pulled the duvet up another few inches, trying to disappear. ‘Great. And your clever lawyer can go along as well.’

She shifted fretfully. ‘Stuart says it’s better to front up without him. Looks less aggressive. I’m to smile sweetly and charm them into changing their plans.’

‘Huh. I bet he’s playing golf this morning.’

‘Matt would like you to be there. He admires you.’

I wasn’t giving in without a fight. This was going too far. Escorting the wretched woman back to Suffolk was one thing; being used as a surrogate Perry was another.

‘I’m busy,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a trans-Africa expedition to organise.’

She jammed her hands under her knees, like a schoolkid. ‘Please, Jake. Can’t you just be a witness?’

I sat up and took another mouthful of tea—disgusting stuff—to buy some time. Outside on the lawn, I could see my friend the rabbit snuffling around in a patch of dandelions.

‘Perry told me about his, um, fear thing.’

‘
Really ?
’ Her eyebrows shot up. ‘Ah, that will have been last night, in the dark hours. I heard your voices. It was the whisky talking.’

‘Probably.’

‘Now you know why he sleeps in the study. He can’t . . . you know. It’s a symptom. Not uncommon, apparently.’

Suddenly it all fitted. ‘Why the dark secret?’ I asked. ‘Not such a disgrace, is it?’

‘Dear, oh dear.’ She looked sadly at me, shaking her head in disgust. ‘That’s just the kind of thing people say who’ve never lived with mental illness, Jake.’

‘Actually, I have. I lived with my dad, and he’s a total nutter.’

‘And I bet you never told a soul.’

That shut me up, because she was right.

‘So.’ She began to pick at the embroidery on my duvet. ‘What did you think?’

‘About Perry? I thought, poor bloke.’

‘Oh no, he’s not. He’s not a pathetic figure at all. He’s all-powerful. I’m sure that isn’t the impression he gave you last night as he wept into his tumbler.’ She snorted. ‘There he sits, lurking like a spider in his web, and we, poor insects, flutter blindly in. Then he sucks our blood. He doesn’t tackle his fears because he doesn’t
have
to. He has everything he needs right here.’

‘No one would voluntarily box themselves up in their own home, Debs.’

‘Look at you,’ she jeered. ‘You were in London, right? With a flat and a girlfriend and a job? Then, next thing you know, you’re on a plane to Mombasa, searching for someone you’ve never even met. It’s utterly surreal. And why? Because Perry asked you to!’

I considered this and then shook my head. ‘No.’

‘What d’you mean,
no
? That’s exactly what happened.’

‘I mean no, I didn’t do it for Perry. I’ve told you, I did it for Matt. And also because my life is a train wreck, and I wasn’t ready to face the fact.’

She fluttered a hand at me. ‘All part of the game. Perry is astoundingly manipulative. He is the puppet master, and we jerk grotesquely on his strings.’

‘I thought he was a spider in a web. That’s a mixed thingy.’

She looked exasperated. ‘Metaphor. Don’t they have schools down under? You can’t escape the fact, Jake, that you were his puppet. And you’re still here. We all are. We’re all trapped in hell.’

I tried the tea again. ‘Have you asked Perry to come with you?’

She went back to vandalising the duvet cover. ‘I did, just to upset him. The very thought of getting into the car can make him physically sick. By the time we reached the main road he’d be choking. He wouldn’t look so bloody dignified any more.’ She pulled out a long thread, dropping it delicately onto the floor with elegant fingers. ‘I’m horrid, aren’t I?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sorry . . . Look, Jake. Matt
so
wants you to come. Please.’

A bird scarer fired somewhere across the fields. The report echoed away into the distance, and a cloud of rooks took to the air, cawing furiously. Deborah waited, without taking her eyes off me.

‘I’m not coming,’ I said. And she smiled.

I disliked the place on sight. It did its best to look inconspicuous, hiding coyly in the middle of a row of other oversized townhouses. Victorian, I should think. Red brick. Lots of ivy. It sported a discreet little sign:
Fintan House
. There was a shrubbery at the front, but you could tell it wasn’t just somebody’s garden. It had that municipal look about it, and beyond the main building lurked a concrete and glass extension.

The three of us trudged up the wheelchair ramp to a solid wooden door. It was a desolate morning; the damp was creeping in under my collar, and I had an ache in one knee. Matt was an old hand. He rang the bell and grunted into an intercom, and the door clicked, letting us into a blue-and-brown-tiled hall with a wide wooden staircase curling up into the shadows. We stood there for a second. I felt like an extra in a horror movie, half expecting to hear wild evil-genius laughter and someone crashing chords on an organ.

The hall smelled of bleach and polish, like my old boarding school. I spotted a door to the right marked
Reception—All Visitors
, and from somewhere on our left floated a brisk female voice.

‘Hi, there! Hi, Matt. Come on in.’ A woman was waiting, holding a mug in one hand and jamming the fire door open with her foot.

Matt jerked his head towards her in greeting, and we followed her into a room with a high ceiling and long sash windows. Wooden partitions subdivided it; and behind one I glimpsed a guy with a harassed crewcut, hunched over a laptop.

The woman transferred the cup into her left hand and held out her right. She was around thirty, I’d have said. More or less blonde, with a little help. Hair in a long ponytail—it really
did
look like a pony’s tail. Attractive, actually, although the barn-door chin was a bit disappointing. Engagement ring, quite flashy. Linen trousers. And tall: her eyes were almost on a level with mine.

‘Mrs Harrison? Imogen Christie.’ She spoke in a clipped, detached shade of Essex.

‘Hi, Imogen.’ Deborah didn’t sound like herself at all. She seemed edgy and ingratiating, and once again I wished I hadn’t come.

The social worker eyed her for a moment longer than was polite. ‘Did you have a good flight? When did you get home?’

‘Last night.’

‘Just last night?’ Imogen’s appraisal flickered over me, and I felt like a cockroach in a bakery. Behind her, Crew cut’s phone began to bleat.

Deborah took a nervous step away from me. ‘This is Jake Kelly, a friend of the family,’ she explained apologetically. ‘Matt wanted him to be here today, since Perry couldn’t come. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘I won’t be any trouble,’ I said, and put on my most appealing face.

My charms didn’t work on Imogen. ‘I’m not sure . . . The team manager, Lenora Blunt, will be available in a minute. She’s making an urgent telephone call right now. Coffee?’ She gestured towards a dusty kettle on a tray.

‘Er . . . lovely,’ said Deborah.

Crew cut had answered the phone but was still staring at his screen and jabbing at the odd key. Imogen picked up two of those glass mugs that make coffee look and taste like the run-off from a sewage plant. Opening a jar of brown talcum powder, she called back over her shoulder towards Matt, who was hanging around in the doorway, his hands in his pockets, looking surly.

‘Matt, Lenora and I are going to have a chat with your mum upstairs. D’you want to come back in an hour?’

He scowled, mumbled something about going downtown, and slouched out. I heard the heavy front door screech shut behind him.

‘If you’ll excuse me for just a minute,’ said Imogen. ‘There’s a waiting area off the hall.’

We parked our backsides on a wooden pew. There was a table with a pile of women’s magazines, and Deborah began to leaf through one. I gave up on the muck they passed off as coffee and stood up again, stretching my knee.

The telephone rang in Imogen’s office, and I strolled into the hall as she answered it. I wasn’t being nosy, honestly. I was just bored.

‘Hi. Yes, Lenora . . .
mutter, mutter
. . . got hold of the lawyer?’

There was a long silence until I heard Imogen shift abruptly; her voice sharpened. ‘
What
? Does he realise how far along the line we’ve got?’ Pause. ‘And he understands that the grandfather’s never bothered to show up? . . . It’s not good enough, Lenora. Where’s Grace in all of this? . . . How are we supposed to carry out an assessment in four weeks flat? Does he realise how understaffed we are? My case load . . . yes, I agree . . . I mean, it’s
us
who have to pick up the pieces.’ Sigh. ‘Oh, well, we’re stuck, then. I’ll wheel the grandmother up. Perhaps we can talk her out of it.’

She dropped her voice to a murmur. I caught the words
support
person
and
come along to hold her hand
.

A thud—phone crashing down?—and Crew cut laughed and said something about a magic, reappearing grandma. There was a pause, for head-shaking I guessed. I scooted back to the waiting room, sharpish. Skidded across the tiles, fell down next to Deborah and snatched up a magazine. Seconds later, Imogen appeared at the door, chin jutting crossly.