Sophie Hannah - A Game for All the Family

As you can hopefully see, I have become obsessed with you and your fake biography, Anne. You’ve made me part of it and I want a resolution. I’d like to know who murdered Perrine Ingrey. It’s a tribute to your creative skills that, despite knowing she isn’t real and never was, I still want to know who killed her and why.

Yours sincerely,

Justine Merrison

From:jmerrison71@gmail.com

To:ellencthatsme@gmail.com

Dear Ellen,

It’s George here. I am missing you more than usual. I think it’s because I know you’re not at home. Isn’t that peculiar? When you’re at Speedwell House, I can at least see the building that contains you, even if I can’t see you. I hope you come back soon. I am devising a flashing-light code that will allow us to communicate properly. It’s quite complicated and will take you a while to learn, but once you have, it will enable us to have proper conversations.

All my love,

George xx

From:ellencthatsme@gmail.com

To:jmerrison71@gmail.com

You don’t have to start every email with “Dear Ellen, It’s George here”!! I know it’s you! Mum’s switched over to a different email address now anyway. Your code sounds amazing!! I’ll learn it v v quickly. I can also write it down and have a manual to refer to in case I get stuck (which I won’t!!) I can’t WAIT to get back to Speedwell House. I’m basically living in a kennel here. The dogs all stick their tongues into my cereal bowl while I’m trying to have brekkie—so gross! I wish you could come and live here with us. Failing that, I wish I could tell you where I am, but Mum says it’s important I keep it secret. You wouldn’t ever tell anyone, would you?

Hugs and kisses and LOVE, Ellen xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

From:jmerrison71@gmail.com

To:ellencthatsme@gmail.com

I wouldn’t dream of telling anyone your confidential location, of course, but you still shouldn’t tell me, much though I yearn to know. I would feel so much happier if I just knew where you were, but I can’t promise that my mother won’t find this phone. Call me a pessimist, but I suspect that one day she will. This situation of being able to converse with you whenever I want to (albeit by machine) is too good to be true, and my fourteen years on this planet have drummed into me that things which are too good to be true don’t happen to me. Apart from meeting you, that is.

Dearest Ellen, don’t tell me where you are because I would smash a window and come and find you, and your mother is right: it wouldn’t be safe. My mother might find a way to get the information out of me. I wouldn’t put it past her to torture me (more than usual) and so it’s better if I’m not in on the secret. My only worry is how long this situation will go on for. I suppose it’s bearable for as long as we can email each other.

All my love,

George xx

From:ellencthatsme@gmail.com

To:jmerrison71@gmail.com

Don’t worry, I think my mum’s planning to tackle the situation so that we can go back to our house—YAY! She keeps hinting she’s had THE BEST idea, and now she and the dog lady are having a whispery conversation in the garden!

xxxxxxxxxx

From:jmerrison71@gmail.com

To:ellencthatsme@gmail.com

That is heartening news. I have every confidence in your mother’s brilliant idea. After all, she had you!

All my love,

George xx

16

That’s my best guess,” Olwen concludes with a shrug. She throws a tennis ball for the dogs, using a plastic contraption that scoops it up off the floor so that she doesn’t have to bend down. “I can’t see who else could have murdered Perrine, but then everything I’ve said is based on the assumption that the story obeys its own internal logic. What if it doesn’t?”

“I think it does,” I say. “It might be a lie from start to finish, but it’s the life history Anne’s chosen for herself. She’s effectively swept the facts aside, substituted this story, and said, ‘This is who I am and what I’ve been through.’ She’d want it to be good. Watertight. The solution you’ve come up with is the best one. It’s the only one that works, and it’s . . . well, if it were true it would be shocking, wouldn’t it? For Lisette Ingrey, if she were real, it would be deeply traumatic.”

“Yes, and if it’s not true, it’s certainly ingenious,” says Olwen. “Though a little obvious, when there’s no other possible resolution.”

“Olwen, trust me, it’s not obvious. I worked in TV drama for years. Thirty twists a day crossed my desk. I thought I’d seen them all, but I could have read that story fifty times and I wouldn’t have gotten it.”

“I reckon you would. All the clues are there, as Ellen points out in the final paragraph. She’s a talented writer, your daughter. If you ask me, the most incredible thing about the story is that a fourteen-year-old wrote it.”

“No. Anne Donbavand wrote it—in her badly warped mind if not on paper. George learned it by heart and passed it on to Ellen, who wrote it down.” The tennis ball lands near my feet, dropped from a furry jaw. Before Olwen has a chance to scoop it up, I grab it and throw it so that it lands next to Figgy: pet nepotism in action. He wouldn’t stand a chance of getting it otherwise, with all these bigger dogs around. He pounces on it and tears off to the bottom of the garden with a triumphant glint in his eye, happily unaware that he didn’t win on merit. “I knew from the first sentence that story wasn’t Ellen’s,” I say.

“And now we know who killed Perrine Ingrey, or we think we might—”

“We do.”

“But how does that help you? The only real thing in the story’s Malachy the dog, so what does it matter?”

“If I’m going to stand a chance against Anne, I need to understand her delusions. On my own terms, I’m always going to lose. She doesn’t play by any rules I recognize. I need to play her game, and win. I think I can. I’m getting to understand her better.”

“She’s bonkers, Justine.” Olwen flashes me a sympathetic look as if she fears I might be too. “What more is there to understand?”

“Some lies are purely functional,” I say. “Like ‘No, Dad, I haven’t been smoking, honestly’ or ‘Yes, darling, of course I’m totally faithful.’ They serve a practical purpose, but the teller knows they’re not true. She doesn’t need them to be true in order to survive psychologically. Other lies are fully fleshed-out fantasies, chosen as preferable to the truth. Anne Donbavand wants it to be true that she was Lisette Ingrey, that she went through all that horror as a child.”

“Why would anyone want that?”

I sigh. “I could guess, but that’s all it’d be: groundless speculation.”

“No! I’m not throwing it again, Wenceslas. Enough! Run along, the lot of you.”

“I think Anne feels victimized,” I say. “Let down by her family—far more than any collection of autobiographical details can adequately explain. She’s a clever woman. She knew she was wounded and probably didn’t understand why. Maybe it was only the business with the dog, or maybe it was that and other things—other ordinary things. If you’re unusually sensitive, it’s possible to be destroyed by incidents that aren’t at all spectacular or dramatic—it doesn’t have to be full-on murder and horror to crush you.”

“So she invented a murdered sister and another one intent on killing her as justification for the way she felt?” Olwen asks. “So that no one would deny her right to feel as bad as she did, or does?”