The sister shrugged. ‘Well, at her age, with her mental condition … that has to be a possibility, you know. They get these fantasies, I’m afraid; all sorts of ideas get jumbled up. When the mind is losing its grip on reality, people no longer always know the difference between real life and something they’ve seen on TV or read – they get confused, start imagining all sorts of things.’
‘It happens even when they aren’t suffering from senility,’ Sean wryly said. ‘A lot of our audience can’t tell the difference between TV and rea
l life at all.’ He looked at Annie’s white, troubled face. ‘Come on, I’ll take you home.’
‘And don’t worry too much,’ said Sister Collins. ‘We’ll take good care of your mother.’ She smiled suddenly. ‘We’re all big fans of your programme, Miss Lang. I shall watch it with even more interest now I’ve met you. It will make it more like real life.’
Annie went through the motions of responding, smiling, saying, ‘Thank you, that’s very kind,’ before she began to move away, still smiling tightly, her jaw aching and her cheekbones locked in that mimicry of a smile.
Sean insisted on driving Annie back home. ‘You’re in no state to go alone,’ he said, putting her into his Porsche. ‘You’ve had a bad shock.’
Annie didn’t argue; she was too abstracted. Had Trudie imagined an attack on her? It had been horribly convincing, in spite of what Sean and the ward sister had said. But why on earth would anyone want to harm Trudie?
‘I recognised him,’ Trudie had said. ‘He hates me … he blames us.’
Who on earth could she be talking about? Could it be Roger?
She frowned; she would start getting paranoid if she wasn’t careful. Why on earth would he attack her mother? He had only met Trudie a couple of times, when she came to the school for public performances in which Annie had a part. He had spent some time talking to her after the first night of Hamlet, of course, and Trudie usually remembered faces – most shopkeepers had a good memory for faces. Trudie undoubtedly remembered Roger.
Annie’s stomach turned, remembering his kiss on stage when they were taking their curtain calls; she could even remember the smell of his skin, the aftershave he must have used, the odour of his sweat, could feel his tongue sliding in and out of her mouth like a wriggling snake.
Eight years and she hadn’t forgotten a second of it. He had made sure of that. Or would she have been haunted by him even if he hadn’t kept sending her Valentine’s cards? Some nightmares keep recurring however hard you try to forget.
He had talked to her mother that night, during the stage party, while he had his arm around her waist, while his fingertips secretly fondled the underside of her breast, out of sight. Yes, he would remember her mother, and Trudie would certainly remember him because she had thought him charming, and because he had been important at the drama school.
But it had been Annie who blew the whistle on him and lost him his job. Trudie had had no part in that. But she was her mother, and Roger Keats would guess that if anything happened to Trudie because of her she would go mad.
When they got back to the white Edwardian house in South Park they found Jerri, her mother’s companion, sitting in the lounge with her bags packed beside her, watching television while she waited for Annie to come home.
‘What happened, Jerri?’ Annie asked.
‘I was cooking her breakfast and she got out, I didn’t hear a thing, I’d left her in front of the TV and when I went back with her breakfast she’d vanished. I’m just not up to the job; she’s a twenty-four-hour-a-day liability and I can’t cope with her. If you’ll just pay me what you owe me so far, I’ll go.’
Annie didn’t argue; she wrote out a cheque then asked, ‘Nobody came to the house, did they? This morning?’
Blankly, Jerri shook her head. ‘Were you expecting someone?’
‘No, but my mother said there was a man hanging around outside, someone she recognised.’
‘Well, nobody came to the house. It was probably one of the neighbours. After all, she knows nearly all of them. Look, Annie, she’s out of it, she doesn’t know tea from coffee any more. I don’t know what she was on about but I do know nobody came to the house this morning. Sometimes Mrs Adams from Number 3 comes over to have a chat with her, or that old woman with the blue-rinsed hair calls in, but nobody came today. If anyone had rung the bell or knocked, I would have heard them. Can I ring for a taxi?’
Annie nodded. Sean wandered over to the window and was pushing aside the curtain to look out into the suburban street. It was dusk now, the street-lights had come on, making pools of yellow at intervals along the pavement, across which fell the shadows of the bare, pollarded plane trees which lined the street.
There was a taxi rank outside South Park Underground station; Jerri’s taxi arrived five minutes later and Annie went to the front door with her while Sean wandered into the kitchen at the back of the house, made tea and carried the tea-tray through to the long, comfortably furnished sitting-room. The colours were faded, the furniture a muddle of periods. He suspected the room had looked this way for a long time; much of the furniture dated back to the nineteen-twenties but some of it was far more modern. Had Annie’s family lived in this house for many years?
Annie shut the front door and came back, looking startled as she saw the tea.
‘Did you make that?’
‘I thought we could both do with some tea,’ he half apologised. ‘It’s a habit you pick up in the police force.’ He handed her a cup and she sat down, nursing it. Sean sat down too, his eyes intent. ‘You took what your mother said about being attacked very seriously, didn’t you? I think you knew what she was talking about. Are you and your mother in some sort of trouble?’
‘I don’t know. It’s just … oh, something happened, years ago, when I was at drama school.’ Annie hesitated, she had never talked about it before, but Sean’s steady eyes and air of never being surprised or shocked by anything somehow made it easy to talk to him. Was that, too, something he had picked up in the police force? Or had he been born with it?
She needed to talk to someone so she told him about Roger Keats, her eyes not meeting his.
‘And ever since you’ve had a Valentine’s card from him every year? Have you kept any of them?’ Sean asked.
‘All of them,’ she said huskily, and his eyes narrowed.