Sophie Hannah - A Game for All the Family

“Where is she?” he says. “I can’t find her.”

“You can’t find your daughter?” asks DC Luce.

“I took a call from my agent. When I’d finished, Ellen had vanished. She’s nowhere in the house, I can’t see her in the garden. Have you seen her?”

No, but I heard her close the front door behind her. So did Figgy.

“I’m sure there’s no need to panic, Mr. Colley,” DC Luce stands up, ready for action.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I know where she is.”

I find Ellen down by the wall at the bottom of the hill, as close to the river as she can get without leaving our land. She’d have made sure to be here in time to see Lionel’s boat make its return trip.

She’s crying. Copiously but silently, as if she hasn’t noticed the tears streaming down her face. Or the cold. She’s got no coat, but she’s not shivering, though the sight of her in her thin white blouse and almost-as-thin green cardigan makes me shiver.

Where is her coat now? If George Donbavand was expelled for stealing it, wouldn’t he also be made to return it? In which case, why hasn’t Ellen brought it home?

I take off my coat and wrap it around her. She doesn’t seem to notice.

“Is she there?” Alex is behind me, with Figgy on the leash. I don’t answer. If I can hear him, he will soon be able to see Ellen for himself. I need to stay focused on what’s in front of me: the scene of a terrible tragedy, judging by my daughter’s face.

“Ellen? What’s wrong? Has something happened?”

“Leave me alone.”

“No. You’re going to need to tell me what’s wrong.”

She looks at me coldly. “Who even are you?” she says.

“Who am I?” I’m not sure what I was expecting her to say, but it wasn’t that.

“I know you’re my mother because we have the same face, but maybe that’s all I know.”

“Ellen, what are you talking about? How have I turned into the bad guy?”

“The freak who keeps calling you, who you say you don’t know—she called you Sandie.”

“Yes, she did.”

“Why?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“I don’t believe you. People don’t just ring up and call you by a different name for no reason.”

Great. First DC Luce and now Ellen. “Not usually, no,” I say, “but apparently now and again they do.”

“What’s going on?” Alex asks.

“I’m not and have never been Sandie, Ellen. You’ve been to Granddad and Julia’s house. You’ve seen my old school reports with my name on them.”

“El, what’s going on here?” Alex sounds angry. “You’re surely not questioning Mum’s identity?”

“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s understandable. Anyone’d take the word of an anonymous stalker who makes death threats over that of the mother they’ve known all their life.”

Figgy looks up from the grass he’s been chewing and makes a mewling noise. I know how he feels.

“I’m sorry, Mum.”

Not good enough. Mothers are supposed to be all-forgiving. I’ll have to admit defeat and relinquish my anger eventually, but not yet.

“Mum?”

“Call me Sandie,” I say in a monotone. “Everyone else does.”

“Why do we never go to Granddad and Julia’s house?”

“We don’t never go. We go sometimes.”

“Hardly ever. When we do go, they always say they’d like to see more of us. You pretend to agree, but then you never arrange it. You still haven’t invited them here, and we’ve lived here for five months. And that time Granddad asked if they could come and stay for my birthday and you said someone else had dibs on the guest room—that was a lie. You just didn’t want him to come.”

I exhale slowly. “El, if you want to have this discussion, we can have it. Soon.”

“But not now,” she says bitterly, as if this sort of disappointment is what she’s come to expect from me.

“No, not now. For now, this will have to do: my reasons for keeping Granddad and Julia at a distance have nothing to do with me being called Sandie, because I’m not and never have been. My name has always been Justine Merrison.”

“All right, you’ve made your point,” Ellen snaps. “Forget I said it.”

Oh, easy. No problem at all. In ten minutes’ time, I will have no memory whatsoever of being accused by my daughter of faking my identity.

“This is madness, El,” says Alex. “You’re out here crying because you’ve suddenly got a yen to see more of Granddad? No offense to Granddad but—”

Ellen lunges at him and snatches Figgy’s leash from his hand. “And I can’t believe we’ve got a puppy! Just when some psychopath starts harassing and threatening us! What if she kills Figgy?”

I flinch at the suggestion. It’s a paranoid fantasy, but I know where Ellen’s coming from. Psychopaths are supposed to escalate from animals to people, aren’t they? If we assume our anonymous caller has never killed a human being . . .

I shudder and tell myself not to be neurotic.

“It’s not safe for him to be with us, Mum.”

It breaks my heart to hear her express worry for Figgy while not saying anything about herself. She must be scared. I wish I hadn’t told her about the phone calls. I should have gone to any lengths to prevent her from finding out about them.

“El, Figgy’s going to be fine,” I say with a confidence I don’t feel. Should I call Olwen and ask her to come and take him back? Would that be the right thing to do? “We’re all going to be fine. DC Luce has said he’ll trace the calls. I trust him to sort this out.” I’d better get back to him, having left him in the living room. Is he taking advantage of our absence to ransack the kitchen cabinets, hoping to find an old photograph of me with the name “Sandie” scrawled across the back? That’s what would happen in a film.

“Aren’t some calls untraceable?” Ellen asks.

“If you’re a tech-savvy criminal mastermind, perhaps,” says Alex. “Not if you’re a crank with a lisp.”

“We should go back to the house and finish up with DC Luce,” I say. “What do you want to do, El?”

“The same thing I wanted to do before: go to school.” She glances at the river.

“Were you crying because you saw George?”

Her face hardens. “No.”

Gently, I take Figgy’s leash from her hand, pass it to Alex and send him a silent signal with my eyes.

“Come on, Figgs,” he says. “You and I have got an appointment with Five-O in the drawing room, yo.”

When they’ve gone, I say to Ellen, “You must miss George a lot. You’re used to seeing him every day. Well, every weekday.”

She nods. “He wasn’t on Lionel’s boat today.”

“Are you sure?”

She gives me a withering look.

“So that’s why you were so upset.”

“ ‘Were’? I am upset! I’ve lost him. I thought I could at least see him from a distance, but now I can’t even do that anymore.” She starts to cry again. “If George doesn’t come looking for me, I’ll never see him again—and how can he come with his parents watching him every second of every day?”

“Hold on, El. Today’s only one day. Just because George wasn’t on—”

“You don’t understand!” she shouts over me. “Today’s a school day, and he wasn’t on the boat. Neither was his dad. They would have been if Fleur had gone to school this morning, so she obviously hasn’t. I knew they’d do it eventually but I didn’t think it would be so soon.”

“You think Fleur’s been expelled?”

“They’ve gotten rid of her, just like they got rid of George!” Ellen turns and runs toward the house. Too slowly, I reach out a hand to stop her and find myself holding nothing but air.