Still the hand clutched his, and then suddenly she seemed resigned to his leaving and her hand slipped away. He wanted to go, but his feet would not take him. Her face was turned upwards, looking at him with such sadness. He bent over and kissed her gently on the forehead, catching a glimpse of himself in a mirror on the wall opposite. He looked pale and tired, and he turned his eyes away from it. The kiss was a simple thing that seemed to come so easily and he was surprised by it. ‘I will come back,’ he heard himself saying. And then he felt the cold of the metal door handle in his hand and he was out in the corridor shutting the door, trembling a little.
Mascoulin was there and he was looking at him strangely. ‘She has a marvellous talent,’ the doctor was saying. They had walked the length of the corridor and were now on the stairs. ‘Children have such a capacity for affection, for love. With most autistic children it is something in which they are frustrated, as they are frustrated in so many other ways.’ Bannerman became aware of him almost for the first time. The doctor went on in the same tone of professional detachment which had irritated him earlier. Only now the words seemed more important than the way they were spoken. ‘Every child needs a love to return. Just a little love goes such a long way and is returned manyfold. Perhaps little Tania has missed out somewhere.’ Bannerman looked at the doctor. It was almost as though he had seen it all, had known what Bannerman had felt. Then he remembered the mirror on the wall beside the bed where he had caught a glimpse of himself as he stooped to kiss the child. He felt momentarily annoyed that he should have been snooped on. But the anger died quickly.
‘The mirror,’ he said. ‘You watched.’
‘We like to be able to keep an eye on the children without them knowing. It can prove extremely useful.’ He paused. ‘I must admit that her response to you was quite exceptional. With everyone else here she has been surly and uncooperative. Even with the mademoiselle whom, I believe, she knew quite well.’ And again he hesitated. ‘Have you... have you known the child long?’
Bannerman shook his head. ‘I know her hardly at all.’ Sally was waiting in the hall. She looked up as she heard them coming down the steps. ‘I do hope you will come again as you promised,’ Mascoulin said. He shook both their hands again and watched them pass through the swing doors and out into the snow. And he thought about the curious scene he had witnessed in the child’s room.
Outside, Bannerman stopped at the foot of the steps and breathed in the cold night air, turning his face slightly upwards so that the snow flakes cooled the hotness of his skin. He felt Sally’s arm slip through his and she guided him slowly towards the car, her feet scuffing in the soft snow. ‘Why did you really come?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ He searched absently in his pocket for the car keys. ‘The first night I stayed at the flat I woke in the night to find her in my room. She was just standing watching me, and then she came and touched my face. She stood there a while longer and then left. It gave me one of the strangest feelings I’ve ever known.’ The keys were cold in his hand and he unlocked the passenger door. ‘Would you like to go somewhere?’
‘You could take me home,’ she said. ‘I’m very tired.’
II
Kale told the driver to go on past. The brass plaque flashed briefly in the headlights of the taxi, a flicker of information caught in a moment of light and time that told him he need look no further for the child. Beyond where Bannerman’s car had turned into the hospital, the taxi made virgin tracks in the snow and its gears whined as the tyres fought for grip. The vehicle pulled slowly towards the top of the hill. Here there were a few trees where the ground levelled off and the road swung away to wind itself down around the other side. Kale stopped the driver and counted out a thick wad of notes. He was not even sure how much it would be in English money. Perhaps a couple of hundred pounds. It seemed extravagant, but then it hardly mattered any more.
The driver took the money and felt its thickness in his hand. He dared not count it then, but he knew it was a lot. Many times more than the fare he had clocked up. He stuffed it hastily in his pocket and half-turned, a stiff smile on his face, and muttered words of thanks. The cold eyes of his passenger flickered briefly over him, each eye reflecting a pinhead of light from its darkness. The face, pinched and pale, said nothing. Only the eyes spoke, a silent warning, before the man turned to open the door and slip quietly out. The driver wasted no time in pushing into first gear and he turned the car out from the kerb and down the hill. He glanced in the mirror and already the man was only a shadow, hardly distinguishable among the trees. He let out a deep breath that he seemed to have been holding in his lungs all day, grinning as he fingered the wad of notes in his jacket pocket.
All his fears and doubts of earlier in the day melted as quickly as the flakes of snow that fell on his windscreen. The thoughts he had entertained, only a few hours before, of going to the police seemed ridiculous now. His passenger had just been some sullen foreigner with his own reasons for wanting to follow the Volkswagen. He pulled the flap over his pocket and patted it with a certain satisfaction. Perhaps he could take a few days off. Even a week’s holiday.
Kale watched the red tail lights of the taxi vanish from view where the road turned away through the trees. He stood for some minutes. At first he felt nothing. Not even the cold. In a few hours it would all be over and then nothing would matter any more. Back the way they had come he could see the lights of the hospital broken by the branches of trees. He barely noticed the view across the city.
He turned and walked back down the hill until he reached the first of the houses that stood darkly behind its high stone walls. There a spindly street lamp rose above its own pool of feeble yellow light, and he stopped to light a cigarette and turn up the collar of his coat. His every movement seemed remote to him, mechanical, as though he had stepped outside his body and was simply an onlooker. He had given himself over completely to the instincts of his profession.
Already the tyre tracks of Bannerman’s car where it had turned into the hospital were almost covered over. Kale hesitated only for a moment in the gateway, then he moved silently from the drive into the trees. Here the snow lay in patches, the thick layer of dead leaves spongy under his feet. There was a smell of rot and decay, damp and cold, among the evergreen foliage. He scrambled up the slope, his sleeves and trousers snagging on the bushes, and then he waited, breathless, at the top, crouched below the cover of the wall that bounded the terrace. A fine, cold sweat beaded his forehead.
For several minutes he remained there before pulling himself up so that he could see beyond the wall, across the terrace to the house itself. A number of cars, including the one he had been following all day, stood under its shadow, the light of the lamp above the main door streaming out across the terrace towards him. Other lights shone in a number of windows, reflecting their brightness in the snow. He crouched down again and made his way along below the wall to where it cut away at the end of the terrace. From here he had an oblique view across the front of the house beyond where the light fell in long yellow slabs. He eased himself in against a short flight of broken stone steps to watch and wait, silent and unseen, with an infinite and chilling patience.
He could not tell how long it was he had waited before the man and the girl came out. They came down the steps and crossed to their car, the damp snow creaking beneath their feet. Their voices drifted across to him and he registered only a little surprise to hear them speaking English. ‘I don’t know... Would you like to go somewhere?’