Finders, Keepers - Sabine Durrant Page 0,96

worse.

Chapter Twenty-one

Blue mohair wool, loose

Disclosure, noun. The action or fact of revealing new

or secret information; action of making something

openly known; an instance of this.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened after I left the hospital – or rather, not about what happened, but about how to report what happened. I had thought all along that I might miss it out of the narrative. The books Ailsa reads, her TV shows, they’re so often about ‘secrets’, as if secrets are something dangerous and invasive, like a deadly gas. Personally, I’ve always been of the belief that secrets are the natural state of affairs, simply an incident or action one chooses not to tell anyone else. Surely that is a basic human right? We all have our skeletons. So it is painful to tell this, though as I reach this point in the story, I realise anything that contributed to Ailsa’s mental state, so close to the murder, is relevant.

It was a surprise to learn it was raining in the outside world. Proper August monsoon rain. A warm, blustery wind threw the drops sideways, like a dog romping with a much smaller dog – playful, but threatening; that kind of wind, that kind of rain.

I half expected to see Ailsa waiting for me. Stupid, really. She had no idea what time I was leaving. Grateful for my cardigan, I half ran, half lolloped to the bus stop, just as the bus was drawing in. The T-shirt of the boy in front of me in the queue was soaked, clinging to his shoulder blades. Inside the bus it was warm and humid, all summer dresses and furled-up umbrellas, the floor muddy and slippery. A woman at the next stop got on carrying a paper bag full of oranges, but the paper was so wet it disintegrated and oranges spilt onto the floor. I helped her pick them up and then sat on the back seat, watching the rain-streaked backstreets flicker by, clutching my bag and a package of medicine on my lap. I’d been shown what to do with the inhaler; I’d been given iron to take for anaemia; I’d make a follow-up appointment with my GP. All would be well and all manner of things . . . And yet again I was filled with unnamed foreboding. Its focus was the dog, and probably at the back of my mind was delayed shock and a perfectly natural anxiety about my own health. But it was something else – call it instinct, or its plainer cousin, suspicion. I began to fiddle with the cardigan. It was loosely knitted in blue mohair. I’d found it on the station steps several months previously and it had become something of a favourite. But the mohair had become very bobbly and I pulled at the patches where the loose threads had bunched – which was easier to do because it was damp – until I had quite a sizeable ball in my hand.

When we drew close to my stop, I collected my things and stood up, and waited by the door until we reached it. As the door slid open, I glanced back at where I’d been sitting, and on the floor I saw a small patch of blue, the size of a robin’s egg – and it took me a moment to realise it was the wool I’d gathered. I must have dropped it as I stood up. Not that it mattered, of course; it was nothing. I stepped out onto the pavement but as I walked along the last stretch of road, the sense of dread I’d experienced was compounded. It sounds ridiculous, but I felt a pang of regret for the wool, as if I’d separated it from a parent, as if I’d left something precious behind.

The gate to my front garden was wide open. A plastic cup from McDonald’s had blown onto the path. A Tesco bag lay sodden, and I picked it up. In the porch the blue toolbox sat, innards exposed, lid cast aside. I saw immediately that both keys, the Yale and the Chubb, were missing. I put my own key in the lock, braced to exert the usual pressure, to force it open against whatever might impede its path. But it swung back easily.

In the hall, I expected to walk into post, junk mail, free magazines, bags of items, recent findings, including the stool and kettle, but a space had been cleared along the middle of the floor,