Free The Safe House by Nicci French

a paper bird created by my semi-detached partner, Danny.’ Was he still my semi-detached partner, or had he become quite detached? I pushed the thought away for later. ‘Look, I can make it flap, sort of. Lovely, don’t you think? After living in this house for a few days you will start to find these little creatures among your clothes, in your hair, sticking to you, in your food. They get everywhere. Men, eh?’
    I was talking to myself largely.
    ‘That’s my room. And this’ – she walked two feet behind me and stopped when I stopped – ‘is the room of my little girl, Elsie.’ The door jammed on a jumble of blonde-maned Barbie dolls, pencil cases and plastic ponies. ‘Elsie is short for Elsie.’ I looked at Finn and she didn’t laugh – well, what I had said wasn’t particularly funny – but she gave me a little nod, more like a single convulsive jerk. I saw the plaster around her throat.
    Downstairs I showed Finn my study (‘out of bounds to everyone’), the living room, the kitchen. I pulled open the fridge door.
    ‘Feel free to take whatever you want. I don’t cook but I do shop.’
    I pointed out tea and coffee and the hole where the washing machine would be and I told her about Linda and Sally and the routines. ‘And that’s about it, except of course that’s the garden’ – I pointed out of the window at the soggy undergrowth, the mulched heaps of leaves that hadn’t been cleared, the frayed edges of the balding lawn – ‘ungardened.’
    Finn turned her head, but still I couldn’t tell if she saw anything at all. I peered into the fridge again and pulled out a carton of country vegetable soup.
    ‘I’m going to heat us up some soup. Why don’t you go and get freshened up in the bathroom, then we can have lunch together.’ She stood, stranded in the kitchen. ‘Upstairs,’ I said encouragingly, pointing, and watched as she turned slowly round and made her way up the broad shallow steps, one at a time and stopping on each step, so slowly, like a very old woman.
    Sometimes I see trauma victims who don’t speak for weeks on end; sometimes words pour from them like a great muddy flood with no barriers. Quite recently a middle-aged man came to me after being in a train crash that he had been lucky to survive. All his life, he’d been reticent, buttoned up. In the crash he’d emptied his bowels (his phrase, through puckered-up lips) in shock, something that seemed to affect him as deeply as all the deaths he had witnessed. Afterwards, when he was released from hospital, he became incontinent with speech. He told me how he would stand at the bus stop, walk into a shop, stand at his front door, and tell anyone who came near him what had happened to him. He played the scene over and over, yet got no relief from its telling. It was just like scratching an unbearable itch. Finn would speak in her own time; when she spoke I would be there to hear, if it was to me she chose to speak. In the meantime she needed to be given a structure to feel safe in.
    I looked at her as she lifted very small puddles of soup in her spoon and carried them carefully to her mouth. What would she say if she could talk?
    ‘Elsie gets back here at six,’ I said. ‘Some days it might be earlier; often I collect her from school myself. She’s excited that you’re coming. I will tell her only what we’ll tell other people: that you’re a student who is staying with us. Fiona Jones.’
    Finn got up, the chair scraping noisily against the tiles of the floor in the kitchen that was too quiet, and took her bowl, still half-full of soup, over to the sink. She washed it and balanced it on the draining-board among all the other dishes, and she sat down at the table once more, facing me and not looking at me. She put her hands around the cup of tea I’d made for her and shivered. Then she raised her velvet eyes to mine and stared at me. It was the first time she had done so and I was unaccountably startled. I felt as if I