Metro Winds

3.

Our apartment was in a many-winged building three storeys high and covering an entire town block that on one side faced the great, wild park where it was always winter to my eyes. There were more windows than anyone could possibly need facing the park, and it was said that a madwoman had designed the apartment, forcing the builders to make it so. This was what came of having a woman design a building, people muttered. Mad she may have been, but if mad, it was a kind of madness angels have, for though the park was a strange and fell place, it was also beautiful beyond describing, for those few of us who could perceive its beauty. Our apartment was the one that faced it most squarely, and my own chamber was at the very centre of the apartment, so that its windows only showed the park, making it seem that outside it was truly winter. I knew the servants thought me morbid to keep the room after what had happened, and subtle pressure had been exerted on me to shift to another chamber, but I had resisted.

As I gazed out over the park, I found myself remembering how Rose had always asked to be taken to play on the apron of snow that sometimes blew a little way out from the ghost trees marking the outer border of the winter park. The snow could be fashioned into snow witches and Rose was always urging me to come and help her before it melted in the heat. I would hang back at the edge of the drift of snow, longing to join Rose, but conscious of Mama watching me and wondering when she would demand the same promise of Rose she had extracted from me.

Occasionally, instead of watching over us as we played in the snow, Mama would walk right to the line of ghost trees and peer through them, as if she were searching beyond them for someone or something hidden from her. She never passed through the trees, but occasionally she would stand there for so long that daylight would seep from the world and Rose’s lips would turn a soft lilac, since she would not leave the snow until she must. One day when Mama had stood staring into the trees for a long time, I walked over the crisp snow to her side and put my hand into hers. She looked at me and the fear in her face faded into a tender sorrow. She said softly, ‘It was snowing the first time I saw your father.’

I do not know what more she would have said, but Rose came running up and threw her arms about Mama’s soft waist, saying impulsively, ‘Let us go into the park now, all three of us together.’ Her little heart-shaped face was flushed with longing and it had astounded me that she, who saw so much, did not see that Mama feared the park.

‘It is late,’ Mama whispered, seeming to speak more to herself than to Rose.

‘It is not so late,’ Rose protested. ‘By dusk we could be at the tower.’

‘Mama does not like the park, Rose,’ I told my little sister gently, wondering if Mama had hidden her fear from Rose, having judged her too young for the litany of warnings given to me. Mama never seemed to realise how clever Rose was, perhaps because she did not focus upon her as she did on me. But to see Rose misunderstanding my mother was astonishing and made me wonder if I knew her quite so well as I thought. Before either of us could speak, Mama caught Rose in a quick embrace, smoothed her hair and urged her to run back to the house to see if Papa’s carriage had drawn up yet, for he was to come home early today so we could go to the fair.

Rose gave a squeal of delight, for she loved the fair, and went running off. I knew the task was a distraction and looked to see what Mama meant to tell me outside the hearing of my little sister. But she only cupped my chin in her cold hand and stared down at me with such a look of baffled angry love that I felt a queer slipping of fear through my bones.

‘Understand that I did not know,’ she said, holding my gaze. ‘I did not know that what I gave away to win my heart’s desire would come to mean everything to me.’ She stroked my hair now and looked down at me with a sorrow so striking that even after her death, a long time after, I could summon up that expression of desperation clearly.

‘I don’t understand,’ I told her with perfect honesty.

‘No,’ she said as Rose came skipping back to report that the carriage was not there. Mama’s expression changed and she gave Rose a brisk warm smile and held out her hand. Rose took it and then reached out as she always did to take my hand, too, giving me her sweet, open-mouthed smile.

Thinking back on those early days in the apartment, I noticed anew the way Mama had always been brisk and cheerful with Rose, rather than tender. She had cared for her and played with her and dressed her up like a doll and sung her songs and tickled her. My mother had needed little enough to fly into a rage with me, but I had never heard her speak a cross word to Rose. Of course, Rose was so good it would have been hard to find a reason for anger, yet I had never felt jealous, because all the overt attention and showy affection Mama bestowed upon Rose had seemed to me a compensation for the fact that she did not love Rose as she loved me. I ought to have felt sad for my little sister, but in truth it had not always been pleasant to be loved so intensely. Indeed, I had sometimes felt Mama’s love for me as a rich, lustrous fur blanket that was beautiful and wondrous but too heavy. Now, pondering the difference in Mama’s treatment of her two daughters, I found myself wondering if she had loved me more intensely than Rose because she had loved Papa more than she had loved Ernst. Certainly her light, affectionate love for Ernst matched the lightness of her love for their daughter, just as her possessive love of me matched the depth of passion she had borne my father.

For some reason, my thoughts drifted to a night some months after the memorial service for Rose, when the solicitor and some business associates and their wives and daughters whom he wished to introduce to Reynaldo had come to dine. After the meal, when Reynaldo and the men withdrew to the library, they to drink porter and smoke their pipes and he to observe how men of substance deported themselves in the absence of women, I suggested a walk in the garden to the wives and daughters. The older women declined, but urged their daughters to go with me.

‘The men go out so they can exchange their secrets, then the older women send their daughters away so that they, too, can tell secrets,’ said Bernice, who was the oldest and boldest of the daughters. ‘I think that we should make up our own secrets in revenge. Let us talk about which of us should be married off to Reynaldo.’

‘You are a terrible cynic to speak of such a thing,’ said one of the others, a tiny, dark girl called Magda. ‘Besides, my mama said it is Willow who is to be married off.’

Bernice, who was frankly and contentedly ugly, smiled and said she supposed I could marry Reynaldo, since he was not related to me by blood and the gap in our ages was not so very great.

‘I think of him as a brother,’ I said firmly, wondering how long it would be before I could be alone again, wondering too if it was true that Reynaldo was trying to arrange a marriage for me. Certainly he had not spoken of it, and in truth it was my stepfather or Silk who ought to manage the matter, but Reynaldo was never averse to taking control of a situation.

Bernice sighed as if I had taken a tray of sweets away without giving her time to choose one. ‘Well then, one of us must certainly be wed to Reynaldo, since we are all daughters of the wealthiest families in the town.’

‘Oh, you are such a silly,’ said Friday, the fourth of our party. ‘First he is too young for any of us, and second, a girl who has a fortune, such as we all will have from our parents, need not marry save for love, and I do not think any of us feels that for Reynaldo.’

‘It matters not what man we wed, so long as we will be safe and cared for, since our husbands will not be the love of our lives,’ Bernice said calmly, stolidly.

Magda gave a shriek. ‘What are you saying, Bernice?’

‘Only that women do not give their deepest love to their husbands. Oh, we can love them, and serve them and adore them. We even obey them if we cannot get away from it. But I believe it is the children we will bear who will bind us most deeply. The love of a child is the love that will truly enslave us, for we might leave a husband, but never a child.’

‘I do not believe the love of a husband must be lessened by the having of children,’ Magda protested.

‘I did not say the love was lessened, only that the love of a child will inevitably eclipse the love a woman has for its father. I am sure that is why men stray so, because the pretty princess they fell in love with has inconsiderately become a wife and a mother,’ Bernice continued. There was a glimmer of amusement in her eye that made me wonder how serious she was.

‘You think a man cannot love the mother of his child?’ Magda snapped.

‘Some rare man might even love the mother of his children more than when she was a princess, but in general, a man has not the capacity to sacrifice himself for love. Not the love of a woman, anyway. He is all too ready to sacrifice himself and his family for an ideal or for his country.’ There was a touch of bitterness here, but none of us remarked upon it, since the voracious political ambitions of Bernice’s father, as well as his neglect of her mother for an actress he kept in an apartment on the other side of town, were all too well known.

‘Men do not love as women do,’ Friday conceded, after a moment. ‘But I think there is a reason for it. Men were once the hunters and the protectors of their families, and they could do neither if they were dead. So they must be selfish and keep themselves alive, for the sake of their families. And also in order to hunt, they must be single-minded and ruthless. Those aspects of their character remain even in this day, preventing them from abdicating their souls when they wed, as women do.’

‘Oh, what a vile discourse,’ Magda cried, looking really repelled. ‘Don’t you think so, Willow? What of falling in love?’

‘I do not think one falls in love in the same way one trips over the edge of a Persian rug,’ I answered her composedly. Yet even as I spoke, I could not help but think of Mama, telling me she had fallen in love with Papa before he had even seen her. And Papa had said he had fallen in love the first time he had set eyes on Mama. Even Ernst spoke of falling in love with Mama at the ball, though she had not told me when she first loved him. Perhaps my poor stepfather grieved Mama’s loss so because he had not felt he ever had a proper grip on her. Perhaps he blamed himself for not winning from her an undying love. Poor broken Ernst. ‘At least,’ I amended, ‘I do not wish that sort of love for myself.’

‘Then what sort do you want? It seems to me we have agreed that there is only romantic love in stories, full of princesses and princes, or the love that comes after, where a woman loves her children and her man is neglected and sulky and goes looking for another princess,’ Friday said with interest.

‘Perhaps that is it,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I want some other kind of love than those kinds. I don’t want a prince or a ruthless hunter. I don’t want someone to fall in love with me at first sight. I want a man who will look more than once before he loves, and when he loves, can love all that I may be as well as all that I am. That probably sounds terribly dull to you,’ I added, fearing that I sounded pompous and self-righteous. They all regarded me in silence, and then Friday spoke. ‘What I think is this,’ she said in her decided way. ‘A woman does not fall in love as a man does. A woman must entice a proposal as a flower sends the scent of its honey to draw the bee to it. Therefore she must judge a man and seek out one who suits her purposes. Consciously or unconsciously, she chooses a father for her children.’

Magda gave a dramatic cry and fell back against the garden wall as if Friday had shot an arrow through her heart. But then she stood up and said almost spitefully, ‘Have they no say in it then, these brainless men? These breeding bulls? These bees who will fall to the lure of the flower?’

For some reason, I thought of Silk, who was a closed door. Would he someday see a woman and fall in love? Maybe all men were locked rooms until someone opened them, and maybe the opening could only be done with love. But if love opened men, what did women do with what they found inside?

‘We can’t speak for men,’ Bernice was saying now, rather dismissively. ‘I am only pointing out that whatever reason we have for loving and wedding a man, we are bound by love to give our whole selves to them, not just our bodies, because of the children we will bear them. And when the children are born, our love is drained off for them and men get what is left, like skimmed milk after the cream has been taken.’

Magda made a face. ‘How horrible and bare you make life seem.’

Bernice shot her a look of friendly contempt. Then she said, ‘It seems to me that the old romantic ideal of falling in love for love’s sake is outmoded simply because it leaves out most of the truth of what it means to wed. That is, all that comes after the wedding.’

The conversation was interesting to me because I had never heard love discussed in this way, as if there were various recipes for it. My idea of love had been shaped by the tales I had read, and by Mama’s loves, and it had surprised me to find I had any opinions on the matter, however muddled.

I had got cold, sitting so long and thinking, and I got up stiffly, undressed and put on my nightgown, then climbed into my bed to lie shivering a while before I slept.

I dreamed that Rose was not dead but in a stone chamber lying on a cobweb-draped bed in a gown of pink gold, scaled like the skin of a snake. Her face was pale as ice and still as stone, yet there was a blush of life upon her cheeks and a red bloom on her lips. A great window behind her opened onto a snowy park and I watched tiny flakes drift in and settle on the cobwebs and on Rose’s cheeks and lips and eyelashes.

‘I must save her,’ I thought. Then a wave of helplessness washed over me, for of course if she were a princess it would take a prince to find her and kiss her back to life. The only way to save her, then, was to bring a prince to her, but where was I to find him?

I woke, and the room felt cold, as if the snow had blown from my dream into my bedroom. But it was only the wind from the winter park, flowing towards the apartment block and through my open window. The maid must have crept in and opened it, for of course she did not feel the cold of the park any more than she could see the snow.

Wrapping myself in my shawl, I padded across the room and sank again into the window seat. I stared out at the moonlit park, thinking of my dream. The grey sky sagged over the white ground of the park, and the white trunks of the ghost trees shivered in the wind. Were those trees inside the park or outside it, I found myself wondering. Snow settled in them sometimes, but the next day their leaves would glitter greenly. Then I wondered for the hundredth time what had led Mama to enter the winter park. If I knew the answer to that question, perhaps I would know what had happened to Rose.

The policeman in charge of the case had asked me soon after the tragedy if it was possible that Rose had gone into the park first, and that Mama had followed her, for while their tracks ran side by side to where my mother lay, the two might not actually have gone into the park at the same time.

‘But where is Rose, since her tracks stop where my mother’s body was found?’ I had asked, for despite all the speculation, there had never been a sign of any footprints to support the theory that Rose had gone away seeking help for Mama.

The senior policeman, who was not old so much as weary and crumpled looking, had regarded me solemnly, perhaps waiting to see if I would answer my own question. He had watchful, intelligent grey eyes that offered neither judgement nor expectation. I had noticed that he spoke a good deal less than the other policemen, and yet when he did speak, it was always to mention something that no one else had noticed. After a long moment, he asked if I thought my mother would have lain down because she felt ill. I said I did not think she would have lain down in the snow if she was ill. A younger policeman who had been listening glanced sharply at me, and only then did I realise that I had spoken of snow. No doubt he thought my mind had foundered. The senior policeman merely looked at me, saying nothing.

Now, I watched the moon cross the sky, thinking how many times the senior policeman had come back to the house to ask questions about Rose and Mama of my stepfather and me, and of the servants, and of the way Reynaldo mimicked with vicious accuracy the slow, careful, waiting silences that punctuated these interviews, muttering wrathfully about harassment.

I felt the policeman suspected me of hiding something because he always sought me out in the end, no matter who else he questioned, yet I had been glad of his visits, for he had seemed to be the only other person besides myself and poor Ernst who had not given up on finding Rose.

One day he came upon me in the garden, sitting on a bench in the shade and gazing across at the winter park. I asked him mildly if he suspected me of knowing something about Rose’s disappearance.

‘The mind is full of secret corners and strange rooms,’ he had answered. ‘It is possible you know something without being aware of it.’

I wept, surprising myself more than I surprised him. He did not try to comfort me or question me or stop me weeping. But when I stopped of my own accord, he offered me his handkerchief and said in the same quiet, unprovoking voice he always used, ‘I thought you did not believe your sister was dead.’

‘I did not cry because I think she is dead,’ I said. ‘I feel as if I am to blame for whatever has happened to her. Mama was always so concerned about what would happen to me, when she ought to have worried about Rose!’

I still felt responsible for what had happened, I realised.

I wondered what the policeman would make of the dream and decided I would tell it to him when he came next. Somehow I did not doubt that he would continue to call, for the mystery of Mama’s death and Rose’s disappearance had taken hold of his mind. I thought of his earlier suggestion that Rose might have gone into the park first, and wondered what had made him think so. It struck me that he might all along have had some theory he had never voiced. Certainly Rose had never feared the park and sometimes she had spoken as if she was only putting off the pleasure of entering it, like someone leaving the icing on a cake till last. I had imagined she was teasing me, but once she ventured to take a few steps under the trees when Mama had not accompanied us, and I had been forced to show her my fear before she would come out to me. Was it possible that Mama had become distracted by something, allowing Rose to slip away? I did not think so, but nor could I believe that Mama and Rose had accidentally strayed into the winter park.

If only I had gone with them to the pantomime. If I had been there, holding Rose’s other hand, I could have kept her from the park, or if not that, then at least we would have been lost together.

I heard a strain of music that reminded me of the velvet song walkers, and I glanced out of the window to see that dawn had come. I looked this way and that along the street, trying to see one of the rare velvet men who passed through the town, but instead I saw a flash of colour, red as blood, vivid and unmistakeable at the edge of all that black and grey and white that was the winter park. I watched until the flash of red resolved into a woman in a scarlet cloak and hood. Then I realised it was not a hooded cloak but a wild mass of red hair. I could not see her face, for she looked down at a great shaggy beast that walked beside her. A dog it must be, yet my first impression had been that it was a bear. She went along the other side of the line of ghost trees and then passed out of view. I wrapped my shawl tighter and flew along to Rose’s old room, which offered a view from one of its windows of the road and the nether end of the park, but there was no sign of the woman.

Deciding I had probably dreamed her, I returned to my room to bathe and dress and went down to breakfast. I had told cook not to come in early, for my stepfather ate almost nothing and I liked to break my fast very lightly and only when I was hungry. But being awake so long had given me an appetite, and I decided to make pancakes the way they had been made in the country of my birth. Once the batter was resting, I melted butter and opened a bottle of preserved cherries. The smell of them was sweet and rich and red and made me think of Mama who had supervised the cooks as they boiled them in sugar syrup, sweat shining on her forehead and making little golden curls riot about her pink cheeks. She had sung as she worked, and I had sat listening to her, rocking Rose in her cradle and waiting for her to spoon a taste into my mouth.

The door bell rang and I heard my stepfather’s voice. A few moments later he entered, accompanied by the policeman I had been thinking of earlier. He guided my stepfather gently, and nodded to me in his characteristic grave, courteous way. I dropped an awkward curtsey, conscious that I was red-faced with the heat and had a splodge of cherry juice on the bib of my apron.

‘Inspector Grey has a question,’ my stepfather said, then he sniffed the air and sorrow washed the slight colour from his face. His dark eyes clouded and he stooped, as if he were under an intolerable burden, and ran a long-fingered hand over his face and left it smudged with a bruise-like weariness.

‘I have made pancakes for breakfast,’ I stammered.

My stepfather flinched, as if I had tried to strike him a blow from behind, then he turned and made his way to the door, hands outstretched, saying not a word as he closed the door behind him.

‘They smell very good,’ said the policeman kindly.

‘Would you like some? I am afraid I have made too much for one and I find that I have no appetite.’ I gulped out the words, striving to control myself. Then I sank gracelessly into the chair my stepfather had grasped, my face streaming with tears.

‘You must eat,’ said the policeman. ‘You must keep up your strength, for hope is the hardest work.’

‘Hope?’ I wondered incredulously if he mocked me. ‘Hope will not save Rose.’ Then I told him my dream, adding, ‘So you see, it is a prince who is needed.’

‘There is truth of a sort in dreams, and in tales as well, but when it comes to life, if there are no princes, well, we must make do,’ said the policeman.

I looked at him, half marvelling. ‘It is surprising to hear a policeman speak in such a poetic way,’ I said.

‘Perhaps it is not as uncommon as you think. We are men as well as policemen, and once we were children. A good policeman must keep his mind open.’

He began dishing out the pancakes efficiently, adding melted butter and warmed cherries, then pouring the coffee I had made into fine china mugs and fetching cream and sugar from the cool closet and pantry. Finally he brought us knives and forks. He seemed to have an unerring instinct for the whereabouts of things and he smiled a little when he caught the expression on my face. ‘I do not have a wife and so I am accustomed to cook for myself. Contrary to popular belief, I am a man who likes to cook and all good cooks have similar habits. So as well as being a policeman and a man who was once a boy, I am also a cook.’

I said nothing, distracted by imagining him going to his solitary bachelor apartment or maybe to a small brown cottage where he would do his own laundry and cook for himself with only a servant to come in and clean for him, not because he lacked wealth, though that might also be true, but because he liked his solitude. He would read poetry, I decided, while he waited for his eggs to cook. But how did such a man fit into the philosophies of Bernice, Magda and Friday? Or mine, come to that?

He put a fork into my hand and began to eat his own pancakes, lifting his brows at the taste of the cherries. I told him that the recipe for preserving them had been Mama’s and a secret she had guarded jealously, supervising the cook and undertaking the final part of the process herself.

‘Your mother had many secrets,’ he said.

I looked up into his grey eyes and thought that in a certain light they had the sheen of moonlit water. ‘I can find out nothing about her before she married your father. I wrote to the country where you were born but the authorities can find no records of her birth. She must have come from somewhere else.’

I thought of the occasional foreign words and sentences she had uttered, usually under stress, and of her saying that among her people a girl became a woman at twenty. ‘She never spoke of her past,’ I said.

The policeman said nothing, but his eyes were searching.

‘Mama loved Rose,’ I said, and heard the defiance in my voice.

He put down his fork, looking genuinely surprised. ‘How did you know I was wondering about that?’

I shrugged. ‘Mama used to say I could see things no one else saw. When I was small she called me The Girl Who Could See the Wind.’ I laughed sadly. ‘It was Rose, really, who saw things about people, but she didn’t see that Mama was afraid of the winter park . . .’ I stopped.

‘Did Rose see what you saw, in the park?’ he asked carefully, treading the tightrope between accusing me of delusion and wanting to understand.

I did not answer.

‘If your sister went into the park after something no one else could see, then it follows that a girl who can see the wind might be able to find clues hidden from the rest of us,’ he said. ‘Might even see what her sister saw.’

‘I promised Mama I would never go into the park. She made me prick my finger with a needle and draw blood to make the swear.’ I stopped, hearing how peculiar that sounded. But the policeman only carried his plate to the sink to rinse it.

‘It was just a thought,’ he said, and he bowed and thanked me for the pancakes before turning to the door.

‘Inspector Grey,’ I called. ‘My stepfather said you had a question.’

‘Ah,’ the policeman said. ‘As to that, you told me a while ago that your mother had sometimes seemed to fear for your safety, yet she did not exhibit the same fear for your sister. I merely wondered if you had any thoughts about what she feared.’

I shook my head and he nodded politely and let himself out.

After he had gone, I sat looking into my cherry-stained pancakes for a long time. Then I wept a few tears of confusion before pushing away my uneaten food and going back upstairs. Sitting in my window seat, I looked out at the park, now striped with sunlight. There was no sign of the woman in red.

Once I had heard the servants speak of the disappearance of Rose. One of the maids whispered that a gang of criminals had captured her, having struck Mama dead, but neither they nor the newspapers that later printed a similar story mentioned that there had been only two sets of footprints, both ending at my mother’s body, which made it impossible for Rose to have been taken by kidnappers. Inspector Grey told me it had been decided to keep the footprints secret as a means of disqualifying the few madmen and women ready to confess to any crime, for while the coroner found Mama had died by misadventure, Rose’s disappearance had given rise to a slew of lurid blackmail and kidnap theories that resulted in several confessional calls. I had asked if it would not be better to reveal the two sets of footprints ending at Mama’s body, making it clear Rose could not have been kidnapped, but the inspector had explained that the callers would then advance occult theories instead. He had given me an odd look then, as if he expected me to offer my own theory, but I had none.

I looked out at the park and summoned up a picture in my mind of Rose holding Mama’s hand as they walked home from the pantomime. She would have been chattering about the performance, no doubt asking questions that would have called from Mama the irritated little cough she always developed when she was asked too many questions. Eventually, she would have snapped at Rose, but then what? In some way that I could not conceive, Rose and Mama had gone into the park together or one after the other. It seemed most likely that Rose would have gone first, Mama following unwillingly. But what happened then to make Mama lie down, and what of Rose? Tests had shown that no footprints had been obscured, deliberately or by chance, nor had Rose’s prints leading to the body been false. The evidence of the footprints showed quite clearly that mother and daughter had entered the park, whether alone or together, and that Mama had lain down of her own volition and died, though no one could determine the cause of death, since it had been a mild night and there was not a mark upon her.

Of cold, I thought, but what had become of Rose?

Nothing, my mind told me. She entered the winter park and she is still there.

Two days later, Inspector Grey called again and asked the servant who answered the door if I would come out to the yard to speak with him. It was odd that he did not come inside, but I took my parasol, for the sun blazed down, and went out. To my considerable surprise, the policeman was standing under the jacaranda tree with one of the velvet nomads.

‘This is Nullah,’ said Inspector Grey. ‘He is a native tracker who works for us sometimes. I brought him to look at the place where your sister disappeared. I thought you would like to hear what he has to say.’ He nodded at the velvet man, who was watching me closely.

‘I am Willow,’ I told him and I held out my hand.

Nullah took my hand in his own enormous warm grasp, and seemed to weigh it more than shake it. Then he smiled at me with the very same familiarity as the song walker in Dusty Town had done long ago. He released my hand, and said something to the inspector.

‘He wants me to tell you he greets you as an equal and invites you to walk about the land with him,’ said the policeman. ‘It is an unusual compliment because Nullah is considered a leader among his people, a spirit guide.’

‘Please ask him whether he saw anything that will help us find Rose.’

But the policeman shook his head. ‘You misunderstand. I brought Nullah here to look at the footprints, but as soon as he set eyes on the park he stopped and said there was no point because the land there will not sing to him. He would have to learn to hear it and that would take many years.’ The velvet man said something, and the policeman nodded and said, ‘He asks now why I summoned him when I have you to guide me.’

‘Tell him that he is mistaken about me. I am not a guide.’

The velvet man seemed to understand and shook his head. He spoke at length to the policeman, who asked several questions and was answered before turning back to me.

‘He says the park is not part of his land. It is a place where another land is pushing through. He says he cannot walk there because he has no link to that place, but that you do. He says he can feel it.’ The inspector shook his head, looking suddenly younger in his puzzlement. ‘Maybe I am misinterpreting. Maybe he is just trying to tell me that he thinks you will be able to discover what happened to your sister.’

The velvet nomad spoke again, a few words, looking at me.

‘He asks if you love your sister,’ the policeman said, then he answered without waiting for me to speak. The nomad nodded, pointed to me and then pointed towards the park.

‘I swore I would not go there,’ I said, and heard fear in my voice. The velvet man spoke again, his eyes holding mine. The policeman exchanged a few words with him and then said, ‘He asked why your mother demanded such a promise. I told him that she feared for you, and he said that the mastering of fear is the first step a child must take away from its mother and father. He said if you are able to master your fear, he could teach you to hear the song of this land.’

‘What do you want of me?’ I asked the policeman.

He sighed. ‘I did not know that Nullah would react as he did. I’ve never heard him talk this way before. To be honest, I wanted to see what you would make of his words, because he seems to see something in that park that I don’t, just as you do.’

‘You want me to go there,’ I said dully. ‘Perhaps I will disappear too. Then instead of solving one mystery, you will have another.’

‘I will come too,’ said the policeman. ‘I will let no harm come to you.’

‘How can you go there?’

‘I will go with you. I need to understand what it is that this park meant to your family – at least to you and your mother and sister. Maybe then I can work out what happened to Rose.’