Free The Safe House by Nicci French Page B

always have to have baths?’) Finn stayed staring at the blank screen.
    Evenings would be the worst, I thought: stretches of time with just the two of us and no structure and Finn just sitting and waiting, but waiting for nothing. I thought of the way she’d looked at me. I rummaged through the freezer: Marks & Spencer steak and kidney pudding, Sainsbury’s chicken kiev, a packet of lasagne (serves two), spinach and cheese pie (serves one). I pulled out the lasagne and put it in the microwave to defrost. Perhaps there were some frozen peas. I wondered where Danny was; I wondered who he was with, and if he had sought comfort and pleasure elsewhere, taking his rage to a different bed. Was he with someone else now, as I nursed a mute invalid? Was he laying his roughened hands on someone else’s compliant body? For a few moments, at the thought, I could hardly breathe. I suppose he would say that I’d been unfaithful to him, in my fashion. Finn, sitting passively in the next-door room, represented a kind of treachery. I wished he was here now and I was heating up lasagne and peas for him instead; then we could have watched a movie on the telly and gone up to bed together and pressed up against each other in the dark. I wished that I could banish Finn, and my foolish and hasty decision to take her in, and return to the past of two days ago.
    ‘Here we are.’ I carried the tray into the living room, but Finn wasn’t there. I called upstairs, at first not loudly, then with greater impatience. No answer. Eventually I knocked at her bedroom door, then opened it. She lay, fully clothed, on her bed. Her thumb was in her mouth. I pulled the duvet over her, and as I did so her eyes opened. She glared at me and then turned her head to the wall.
    And so ended Finn’s first day. Except later that night when I’d gone to bed myself and outside it was quite dark in the way that only the countryside can be dark, I heard a thump from Finn’s room. Then another, louder. I pulled on my dressing gown and padded along the chilly corridor. She lay quite asleep, both hands covering her face like someone hiding from an intrusive camera. I went back to my warm bed and heard nothing more except the hoot of an owl, the sigh of the wind, horrible unfiltered country sounds, until morning.

Ten
    Finn was a chilly presence in the house. I’d see her out of the corner of my eye: slumped somewhere, shuffling somewhere. In all the debates about safety and status, what hadn’t been discussed was what she was actually meant to do in my house from hour to hour. In the first couple of days she was with us she woke early; I heard the slap of naked feet on the bare boards of the landing. At breakfast-time I knocked on her bedroom door, asking if I could bring her anything. There was no reply. I saw nothing of her until I returned from driving Elsie to school. She would be sitting on the sofa watching daytime television, game shows, public confessions, news broadcasts, Australian soap operas. She was impassive, almost immobile, except for worrying at the plaster on her neck. Fidget, fidget, fidget. I brought her coffee, black with no sugar, and she took it and cupped her hands around it as if to draw its warmth into herself. That was the closest to human contact for the whole day. I brought her toast but half an hour later it was untouched, the butter congealed.
    When I encountered Finn, I would talk to her casually, in the sort of spirit that you might speak to a patient in deep coma, not knowing whether it was for your benefit or theirs. Here’s some coffee. Mind your hands. It’s a nice day. Budge up. What are you watching? The occasional questions came out by mistake and provoked awkward silences. I was embarrassed and furious with myself for being embarrassed. I was professionally as well as personally discomfited. This was supposed to be my field and I was behaving absurdly, as well as ineffectually. But it was the situation itself that was