LITMIR.BIZ

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had increased since she had stopped smoking the previous summer. ‘Waste not, want not.’

      ‘So we’ll need to clear the back bedroom?’

      ‘It won’t clear itself, will it?’ said Thelma through a mouthful of Eddie’s supper. ‘And while we’re at it, we might as well sort out the basement. If we have a lodger we’ll need the extra storage space.’

      The next few days were very busy. His mother’s haste seemed indecent. The back bedroom had been used as a boxroom for as long as Eddie could remember. Thelma wanted him to throw out most of the contents. She also packed up her husband’s clothes and sent them to a charity shop. One morning she told Eddie to start clearing the basement. Most of the tools and photographic equipment could be sold, she said.

      ‘It’s not as if you’re that way inclined, after all. You’d better get rid of the photos, too.’

      ‘What about the dolls’ house?’

      ‘Leave that for now. But mind you change your trousers. Wear the old jeans, the ones with the hole in the knee.’

      Eddie went through the photographs first – the artistic ones in the cupboard, not the ones on the open shelves. The padlock key had vanished. In the end Eddie levered off the hasp with a crowbar.

      The photographs had been carefully mounted in albums. The negatives were there too, encased in transparent envelopes and filed in date order in a ring binder. Against each print his father had written a name and a date in his clear, upright hand. Usually he had added a title. ‘Saucy!’ ‘Blowing Bubbles!’ ‘Having the Time of Her Life!’

      Eddie leafed slowly through the albums, working backwards. Some of the photographs he thought were quite appealing, and he decided that he would put them to one side to look at more carefully in his bedroom. Most of the girls he recognized. He came across his younger self, too, but did not linger over those photographs. He found the Reynoldses’ daughter, Jenny Wren, and was astonished to see how ugly she had been as a child; memory had been relatively kind to her. Then he found another face he knew, smiling up at him from a photograph with the caption ‘What a Little Tease!’ He stared at the face, his excitement ebbing, leaving a dull sadness behind.

      It was Alison. There was no possible room for doubt. Stanley must have taken the photograph at some point during the same summer as the Peeing Game. When else could it have been? Children grew quickly at that age. In the photograph Alison was naked, and just as Eddie remembered her from their games in Carver’s. He even remembered, or thought he did, the ribbon that she wore in her hair.

      They had both betrayed him, his father and Alison. Why hadn’t Alison told him? She had been his friend.

      After lunch that day his mother sent him out to do some shopping. Eddie was glad of the excuse to escape from the house. He could not stop thinking of Alison. He had not seen her for nearly twenty years, yet her face seen in a photograph still had the power to haunt him.

      On his way home, Eddie met Mr and Mrs Reynolds in Rosington Road. He turned the corner and there they were. He had no chance to avoid them. The Graces and the Reynoldses had been on speaking terms since Jenny Wren’s visits to the dolls’ house. Eddie glanced at Mrs Reynolds’s sour, unsympathetic face, wondering whether she had seen him trespassing in Carver’s the previous autumn.

      ‘Sorry to hear about your dad,’ Mr Reynolds said, his face creasing with concern. ‘Still, at least it was quick: that must have been a blessing for all of you.’

      ‘Yes. It was very sudden.’

      ‘Always a good neighbour. Couldn’t have asked for a nicer one.’

      The words were intended to comfort, but made Eddie smile, an expression he concealed by turning away and blowing his nose vigorously, as though overwhelmed by the sorrow of the occasion. As he did so he noticed that Mrs Reynolds was staring at him. He dropped his eyes to her chest. He noticed on the lapel of her coat a small enamel badge from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

      Perhaps that was why she spent so much time staring over Carver’s, why she had the field glasses. Mrs Reynolds was a bird-watcher, a twitcher. The word brought him dangerously close to a giggle.

      ‘Let us know if we can help, won’t you?’ Mr Reynolds patted Eddie’s arm. ‘You know where to find us.’

      The Reynolds turned into the access road to the council estate, passing a line of garage doors daubed with swastikas and football slogans. Eddie scowled at their backs. A moment later, he let himself into number 29.

      ‘Where have you been?’ his mother called down from her room. ‘There’s tea in the pot, but don’t blame me if it’s stewed.’

      The hall felt different from usual. There was more light. An unexpected draught brushed his face. Almost instantaneously Eddie realized that the door to the basement was standing wide open; Stanley’s death was so recent an event that this in itself was remarkable. Eddie paused and looked through the doorway, down the uncarpeted stairs.

      The dolls’ house was still on the workbench. But it was no longer four storeys high. It had been reduced to a mound of splintered wood, torn fabric and flecks of paint. Beside it on the bench was the rusty hatchet which Alison had used to break through the fence between the Graces’ garden and Carver’s, and which Stanley had found lying under the trees at the end of the garden.

      Eddie closed the basement door and went into the kitchen. When she came downstairs, his mother did not mention the dolls’ house and nor did he. That evening he piled what was left of it into a large cardboard box, carried it outside and left it beside the dustbin. He and his mother did not speak about it later because there was nothing they wanted to say.

5

      ‘We do but learn to-day what our better advanced judgments will unteach tomorrow …’

      Religio Medici, II, 8

      Oliver Rickford put down the phone. ‘It’s all right,’ he said again. ‘It’s not Lucy’s.’

      Sally was sitting in the armchair. Her body was trembling. Yvonne hovered behind the chair, her eyes on Oliver. He knelt beside Sally, gripped her arm and shook it gently.

      ‘Not Lucy’s,’ he repeated. ‘Not Lucy’s hand. I promise.’

      Sally lifted her head. On the third try, she succeeded in saying, ‘They can’t be sure. They can’t know it’s not Lucy’s.’

      ‘They can in this case. The skin is black. Probably from a child of about the same age.’

      ‘Thank God.’ Sally dabbed at her eyes with a paper handkerchief. ‘What am I saying? It’s someone else’s child.’ Still the shameful Te Deum repeated itself in her mind: Thank God it’s not Lucy, thank God, thank God. ‘Did they tell you anything else?’

      Oliver hesitated. ‘They haven’t had time to look at the hand properly. But it looks as if it was cut off with something like an axe. It was very cold.’ He paused again. ‘In fact, they think it may have been kept in a freezer. It was still defrosting.’

      Yvonne sucked in her breath. ‘Jesus.’ She glanced at Sally. ‘Sorry.’

      Sally was still looking at Oliver. ‘No link with Lucy? You’re sure?’

      ‘Why should there be? The only possible connection was in the minds of those hacks downstairs.’

      Sally clenched her hands, watching without interest as the knuckles turned white.

      ‘Would it be a good idea to try to rest for a while?’ Oliver suggested. ‘There’s nothing you can do at present.’

      Sally was too tired to argue. Her strength had mysteriously evaporated. Clutching the box of paper handkerchiefs, she smiled mechanically at the two police officers and left the room. The door of the room she shared

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