She selected the first on her list, Bruna Cubillas, the first alphabetically but also the first in Ellie’s affections. There’d been replies from Bruna, enough for a real relationship to be established, and written with an intensity of feeling that took Ellie by surprise. She’d mentioned this to Feenie, who’d said, ‘If someone offers you a helping hand when you’re drowning, you grip tight.’
She began to write.
Dear Bruna,
How are you? I am sorry I have not written to you for so long but my life was turned upside down a little while ago.
She paused and tried to think how turned upside down could be rendered in Spanish. She usually made some attempt to translate the more idiomatic bits of her letters, though perhaps by now it wasn’t necessary. Bruna had said she was keen to build on her smattering of English, and asked for some books to help her. Ellie had sent off a boxful, ranging from The House at Pooh Corner to a complete Shakespeare, but what progress she might have made Ellie had no idea. A hasty postscript to Bruna’s last letter had offered a gracias for ‘the book’, meaning presumably the suspicious and repressive prison regime had allowed only one of her boxful through. That was, she worked it out, almost a year ago. Ellie had written several letters since, but her last had been several weeks before Rosie’s illness. She thought ruefully of how flimsy a thing her concern for this poor imprisoned and probably tortured woman thousands of miles away had proved in the presence of immediate and personal pain, but she couldn’t feel guilty. Once, perhaps, but not now. Am I growing more or less selfish?
She returned her attention to the letter.
How much of her recent trauma should she lay out here? Feenie’s words came back to her. ‘Tell them everything about yourself,’ she commanded. ‘However trite, however tragic. That way they’ll know you really care, you’re not just dishing up nourishing broth for the peasants. What you’re doing is letting them know there is a real world still going on beyond their prison walls, there are real people still living their lives beyond the blank faces of their guards and torturers.’
But when Ellie had asked for information about Bruna, Feenie had shaken her head.
‘Best you don’t know,’ she said. ‘These women live under regimes and in circumstances you can’t imagine. Sometimes they are totally innocent, but sometimes they may have done things which you in your ignorance could find hard to understand or justify. All you need to know is that they are suffering cruel and unnatural treatment. It is your task to give them hope. What they give you in return is up to them.’
Ellie began typing again.
My little girl Rosie was taken ill…
The phone rang.
Irritated, she went next door into the bedroom and picked up the receiver.
‘What?’ she bellowed.
‘Charming. I wish I hadn’t bothered.’
‘Daphne, is that you? What’s up? You forget something?’
‘Only how brusque you can be. Listen, I just thought I’d ring you to tell you you’re being watched.’
‘Yes, I know. Dennis Seymour. I thought you said he spoke to you…’
‘Don’t be so dim, Ellie. I don’t mean him. You know those plane trees on that little triangle of no-man’s-land at the corner of your road? Well, I noticed this fellow hanging about there when I drove past earlier. Only then, not knowing anything about yesterday’s punch-up at the Pascoe corral, I didn’t pay much heed. But when I passed the trees just now and saw he was still there, still looking towards your house, I thought, Hello-Hello-Hello, this looks like one for a citizen’s arrest.’
‘Daphne, don’t you dare! Don’t do anything. I’ll get the guy on watch to deal.’
‘So what are you going to do? Run out of the house and point this way? No, listen, untwist your knickers. Count up to a hundred. All I’m going to do is get out of the car and stroll back towards him and distract him with brilliant conversation. When you get to a hundred, then head out to your guardian angel and send him winging this way as quick as he likes. And if chummy here tries to do a runner, I’ll stick my leg out and send him sprawling, a tactic for which I was once renowned in Mid-Yorkshire girls’ hockey circles.’
‘No,’ insisted Ellie. ‘Do nothing. I’ll –’
‘Start counting. One, two, three…’
The phone went dead.
Ellie didn’t hesitate. She went sprinting down the stairs, out of the house, down the drive, waving and calling to the watching Seymour. He spotted her and started to get out of the car.
‘No!’ she screamed. ‘Stay there! Start up!’
He was, God be thanked, quick-witted enough to obey.
‘Turn, turn, turn! Go, go, go!’ commanded Ellie, scrambling into the passenger seat.
‘Where are we going?’ he asked calmly as he accelerated through a U-turn, getting the car up to sixty in about nine seconds.
‘We’re there!’ she yelled. ‘Stop. Oh, sweet Jesus.’
The car snaked to a halt alongside the plane trees.
A figure slumped against one of them, head thrown back to show a face which was a mask of blood.
‘Call an ambulance,’ cried Ellie, leaping from the car and rushing towards her friend. ‘Daphne, are you all right?’
The woman made a gasping noise which may or may not have been an answer, but at least her eyes were open and she was moving and breathing.
‘Why didn’t you wait?’ Ellie couldn’t stop herself from asking as she knelt to examine the damage. ‘Oh Jesus. What a mess. Is it just your face or are you hurt anywhere else?’
‘…aar…’ gasped Daphne.
‘What? Where?’
‘Car. Bastard took my car. Oh God. Look at the state of this blouse.’
vii
a pint of guinness
‘That’s two days in succession our street’s been full of police cars,’ said Ellie. ‘The neighbours are going to start complaining about you bringing your work home.’
‘They should think themselves lucky I’m not a rock star,’ said Pascoe.
‘We should all think ourselves lucky for that,’ said Ellie.
They were at the hospital, to which Ellie had accompanied Daphne in the ambulance. Pascoe had arrived almost simultaneously. He could see she was seriously stressed, but coping by dint of having someone else to look after. Activity had always been her way of dealing with life’s ambushes.
She’d told him what little she knew. Daphne had gasped out her car number and the policeman on watch had put out an alert. Apart from that, she had on Ellie’s insistence concentrated on using her mouth for breathing.
‘Peter, how’re you doing? You here for Mrs Aldermann?’
Dr John Sowden was an old acquaintance, almost an old friend, of Pascoe’s. They had first met at the intersection of a police and medical case and perhaps because that had marked out so clearly the parameters of their areas of common ground, their friendship had somehow only flourished in miniature, like a bonsai tree.
‘That’s