by Lisa Jewell
She pulls her phone from the arm of the sofa and switches it on. She opens up the photo she took of the painting and zooms in on it with her fingertips, then moves around the image from corner to corner, trying to find the thing that makes sense of it. As happens when she’s plotting a novel in her head, she mentally lines up the players and the timeline and the clues and tries to arrange them into a logical narrative.
And then she feels a shiver run through her as she realizes that she’s got it. Or at least, she’s got the key to it. The metaphorical monkey wrench to pull the whole thing open with. She gasps slightly, loud enough for Shaun and the twins to all turn to her as one and look at her questioningly.
“Are you OK?” asks Shaun.
“Yes,” she says. “Yes. I just, er, I had a thought about the new book, a way to make it work. I think I might just, er…” She gets to her feet. “Do you mind?” she says. “If I do a bit of work? I won’t be long.”
She scurries from the living room and to her desk, where she flings open the lid of her laptop. She scrolls quickly through one of the articles she’d found after her meeting with Jacinta Croft about the history of secret tunnels in old houses and discovers, as she’d suspected, that many secret tunnels were accessed via “camouflaged doors hidden behind paintings or sliding bookcases, or even built into an architectural feature.” She finds many pictures of stone spiral staircases in medieval buildings and castles, all of them spiraling upward, toward turrets like the one in Scarlett’s painting. But what if the architect of Dark Place had designed a spiral staircase that went down as well as up? And what if you could access it through a secret slab of stone at the foot of the visible staircase? And what if that weird metal implement in Scarlett’s painting was actually designed to lift up the secret slab of stone?
She screenshots the article and then WhatsApps the page and the photo of Scarlett’s painting to Kim.
Is this what the tool looked like that the police found in the flower bed? she types, adding in an arrow pointing to the implement in the painting.
She presses send and waits for the ticks to turn blue. Almost immediately she sees that Kim is typing.
Yes, comes her response. Nobody could work out what it was.
A shiver runs through Sophie as she realizes what this might mean. Look at the rectangle of light on the painting, at the bottom of the steps.
Kim replies, OK.
This is a painting that Scarlett made. Apparently it’s of a stone staircase in Dark Place.
Kim replies with an emoji with a slack jaw.
Then she says, Can I send this to Dom?
Yes, of course, Sophie types. Be my guest.
* * *
Shaun and Sophie put the twins to bed at nine thirty, finish the dregs of the wine they’d had with dinner, and then head to bed themselves. Sophie watches Shaun remove his clothes and pull on the T-shirt and cotton trousers he wears in bed. The pulling on of the T-shirt and the cotton trousers is a silent signal that there will not be any sex tonight and that’s fine with Sophie. The day has been inordinately long and intense. Her head is packed with things that have no correlation with sex: dusty tunnels and missing teenagers and grieving mothers and haunted-looking girls with PTSD on YouTube. She unties her hair from its ponytail and she slips into her own pajamas and then eases herself gratefully under the duvet.
“Did you manage to get some good work done?” Shaun asks.
She should tell him, she thinks. She should tell him what’s been happening and whom she’s been talking to, she should tell him about the paintings in Liam’s room, about talking to Kim. But she can’t. She just can’t. This weekend is meant to be about the twins. He hasn’t seen them for three weeks. It’s the longest he’s ever been without seeing his children. The only reason they ever came to this stupid school in the first place was so that Shaun could afford to educate his children the way their mother wanted them to be educated. This was never about Shaun’s career. If this had been about his career, he’d be running a huge, sprawling state secondary school in inner London right now, not this glorified crammer college in a chocolate-box village. He sacrificed so much to do this and she did not have to come with him; it was her choice to be here. He didn’t cajole or persuade her.
And now his children are finally here and this weekend needs to be perfect, absolutely perfect: two whole days unsullied by work or detectives. Just the four of them doing wholesome, countryside things as a family.
So she nods and she says, “Yes, I got a few words written.”
He smiles at her and says, “Well, that’s good. Maybe you’ve finally broken through your writer’s block? Maybe it’ll all start to flow now.”
“Yes,” she says. “Let’s hope so.”
As she says this her phone buzzes with a message. She picks it up and looks at it. It’s Kim.
Dom says they’ll definitely get a warrant to go into Dark Place now. Hopefully as soon as tomorrow morning. Thanks for everything. You’re amazing.
She types a reply. No worries. Glad I could help.
“Who was that?” asks Shaun.
“Oh,” she says, “just the family WhatsApp.”
She turns her phone off, plugs it in to charge, and closes her eyes with her head full of staircases that spiral around and around and down into the dark soft sands of sleep.
54
JUNE 2017
Scarlett turns up the volume on the radio in Lexie’s car and opens the window. Tallulah is sitting on Zach’s lap, squashed in the back with Liam and Mimi. Her head is spinning. She hasn’t drunk more than half a bottle of wine in months. She hasn’t taken recreational drugs since she was fourteen. She can feel the outline of the ring box in Zach’s pocket against the back of her leg. She sticks her head out of the window to suck in gulps of warm night air. Trees flash by in streaks of black and gold, lights race toward them coming the other way in blurred disks of white. The sky is still holding on to its last mouse-gray shreds of daylight.
Scarlett was meant to tell Zach about them. That was plan B. She was going to tell Zach that she and Tallulah were in love with each other, and Zach was going to look at Tallulah with wide eyes of disbelief and stifle a harsh laugh and say, What? And Tallulah was going to say, It’s true. I’ve been trying to tell you for weeks, but I couldn’t find the right moment. And then Zach would have stormed off or thrown up or started a fight or screamed or cried or raged or something. And it would have been over. It would have been dreadful, but it would have been a moment of no return.
But Scarlett has for some inexplicable reason extended the agony by dragging everyone back to her house for a pool party. Tallulah had messaged her earlier in the pub: What r u doing???
Scarlett had replied ALL UNDER CONTROL and then sent her a conspiratorial look across the table.
They pull through the gates of Dark Place and head down the long driveway to the house, the outline of which Tallulah can see in three separate and distinct versions. She blinks to try to bring the three images into alignment, but it doesn’t work.
Lexie parks up and they all dismount, tumbling from the tightly packed car onto the graveled driveway. Scarlett leads them all through the metal gate at the side of the house and onto the pool terrace and heads straight into the pool house, where she switches on the garden lighting and the Sonos sound system and returns a moment later with a handful of cold beers from the fridge. Zach perches on the edge of a sun lounger and Tallulah sits behind him. Scarlett is singing along loudly to the music on the system and Liam is joining in. Lexie and Mimi are on their phones.
Scarlett passes Tallulah a beer and she takes it from her. “Cheers,” says Scarlett, dancing as she holds her beer bottle out toward Tallulah’s. “And cheers to you too, Zach. It’s great to finally meet you.”
Zach touches his bottle against hers and says, “Likewise,” but even from here, sitting behind him, Tallulah can feel the dislike emanating from him.
Scarlett dances back toward Liam and Mimi and toa
sts them as well. Then she rests her beer on a table and pulls off her T-shirt. She’s wearing a small vest top underneath. She unbuttons her shorts, steps out of them, revealing the unsexy black underpants that Tallulah is so familiar with, and then, in a flash, she’s in the pool.
Tallulah stares as she soars across the bottom of the pool, the distorting lens of the pool water making her look even longer and leaner than she is. Then she emerges at the end and pulls herself up onto the pool edge, pulls her wet hair off her face, and says to Tallulah and Zach, “Are you coming in?”
Tallulah says, “No. I don’t want to get my hair wet.”
And Scarlett says, “Oh, come on, Lula, I know how much you like getting your hair wet.”
And Tallulah sees Zach’s shoulders flinch before he tips his beer bottle to his lips, briskly, and drinks hard from it.
She laughs nervously. “Seriously. I washed it this morning and blow-dried it and everything. I can’t be bothered doing it all again tomorrow.”
“Oh, Lula. You and your precious hair. Come on! Don’t be moist. Get in!” She pulls two handfuls of water from the pool and throws them at Tallulah, splattering Zach in the process, who gets quickly to his feet, yells, “Fuck’s sake! Watch it!”
“You may as well get properly wet now. Come on, Zach. Show your girlfriend how it’s done.”
Zach starts unbuttoning his shirt. He pulls it off and then he pulls off the white T-shirt he was wearing underneath and Tallulah can see the muscles in his back ripple and wriggle beneath his flesh. Then he unzips his trousers and pulls them off and he is naked apart from his fitted Lycra boxer shorts.
He turns to Tallulah and says, “Come on, then. Do as your friend tells you.”
There is something in the atmosphere that is so sour and so swollen that Tallulah can barely breathe. It’s formed directly in the space between Scarlett and Zach, and it’s getting bigger and bigger. She nods and pulls off her shorts but not her floaty top, feeling self-conscious in front of Mimi and Liam and Lexie. She twists her hair into a knot and then jumps straight in, water rocketing into her ear canals, gushing over her skin, blowing her top up into a billowing cotton jellyfish. She bursts out again and finds herself face-to-face with Scarlett, who brushes her lips quickly against hers before going under again. Tallulah turns and sees Zach just as he emerges from the water and he makes the noise that people make when a swimming pool is colder than you expect it to be and he shakes his head, droplets of water catching the light as they fly from the tips of his hair like crystals. And now Tallulah is sitting between Zach and Scarlett and the energy between the two of them is so toxic that you could choke on it.
Once again Tallulah finds herself thinking of her baby boy, the familiarity and warmth of his tiny body, the feel of him in her arms, against her body, the smell of his nighttime breath, and she feels, suddenly, that she doesn’t want anyone. Not Scarlett, not Zach. She just wants to be alone.
She kicks her legs behind her to get her to the steps and climbs out. As she does so, Mimi and Liam both jump in. She goes to the pool house and grabs a big black towel from a perfectly arranged stack of rolled-up towels and she wraps herself in it and sits on a lounger and watches the others in the pool for a while. The loud music drowns out the sounds of screaming and squealing and Tallulah watches with discomfort as Zach puts Scarlett on his shoulders and enters into a battle with an inflatable hammer with Mimi, who sits atop Liam’s shoulders.
She shakes her head a little, to dislodge some water, but also to try and right the wrongness of watching her lover and her partner entwined in wet underwear. She sees Zach turn slightly to acknowledge her; the look he gives her is like a shot of ice. She nods and forces a smile, shivering slightly as her body temperature starts to drop. “I’m going to get dressed,” she says, collecting her shorts and Zach’s shirt, her phone and her bag, and heading into the house.
There’s a small room off the kitchen; Scarlett calls it the snug. It’s lined with bookshelves and lit with low-level lighting, has two small red sofas facing each other across a big walnut coffee table covered with interesting objects, big glossy hardback books, and a fan of interiors magazines. She slides the door closed behind her and peels off her wet top, then puts on Zach’s T-shirt, takes off her wet knickers, and pulls on her shorts. She turns her head upside down and twists the black towel into a turban over her wet hair. She wants to stay in here. It’s warm and it’s safe. She feels protected from the strangeness of the evening, from the terrible energy in the air. She taps on her phone and sees that it is nearly 1:00 a.m. She thinks about texting her mum, but then thinks that she is probably asleep by now and that she would be waking her up unnecessarily, so she turns it off again and sits down on the little red sofa and picks up one of the big glossy books and starts to flick through it, the words and images blurring in front of her eyes, reminding her that while she is less drunk than she was, she is still far from sober.
“There you are,” says a deep voice at the door. It’s Zach. He’s back in his shirt and trousers, his wet hair slicked away from his face. “What’s the matter with you?”
He slides the door closed behind him and stands framed by it, a halogen just above his head throwing sinister shadows down his face.
“Nothing,” she says. “Just came in to get dry and warm.”
“And left me out there like a dick?”
“Zach,” she says. “It was your idea to come here. I wanted to go home two hours ago, remember?”
“Yes, I do remember. But then I thought, you know, maybe you were just saying you wanted to go home for my sake, and I didn’t want your friends to think I was cramping your style.”
“I didn’t want to come. I wanted to go home. I still want to go home. I’m calling a cab now.”
She gets to her feet, and as she does so, Zach strides toward her and says, “No. No, we’re not going anywhere. Not yet.”
He stands close enough for her to smell the chlorine on him, to feel the heat of his breath.
“I want to go home,” she says again, a hint of defeat in her voice.
She goes to move past him, but he grabs her arms, hard. “Do you know what I was going to do tonight, Lula? Do you have any idea what I was going to do?” He releases one of her arms and dips his hand into the pocket of his trousers, pulls out the small black box, and shoves it against her breastbone so hard she can already feel a bruise start to form.
“Ow,” she says, rubbing at her sternum. “That hurt.”
“Open it,” he snarls.
She inhales deeply and unclicks the fastening, then stares in numb horror at the tiny nub of diamond glittering at her under the low halogens. There it is, she thinks. There it is. The reason for every last dreadful minute of this evening.
She clicks the box shut again, hands it back to Zach, and says, “I would have said no.”
The power of her own response leaves her feeling winded.
He rocks slightly. “Right,” he says. “Right.”
For a moment, Tallulah thinks maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s done. Maybe her journey with Zach is finally over and it really was simple as that. But she stares at Zach and sees his expression pass from numb acceptance through confusion and then, quickly, so quickly, into black rage.
“It’s her, isn’t it?” he says. “This is something to do with her.”
“Who?”
“That girl. Scarlett. Ever since she walked into the pub tonight you’ve been on edge. That’s why I came back here. I wanted to see what was going on. So. What’s the deal?”
Tallulah feels something surge through her, like a stampede. “We’re together,” she says bluntly.
Zach’s face contorts into an ugly mask of incomprehension. “What?”
“Me. And Scarlett. We’ve been seeing each other.”
There. It’s done. It’s said. It’s over. Tallulah breathes out heavily and waits.
“You mean, like…” He cannot find the words to describe something that he cannot counten
ance. “You and her? Like…”
“Having sex. Yes.”
“Oh. Oh my God.” He stumbles slightly and groans. “Oh my God. Oh Jesus. I knew it. Jesus fucking Christ, from the minute I saw that photo on your phone, I knew it. It was so obvious. So, were you having sex then? You and her?”
“No. God. No. That was only the second time I’d even spoken to her.”
“But did it start that night?”
“No. No. Not for ages. Not until you and me started having problems.”
“What problems? We haven’t been having any problems.”
She blinks at him. She has no idea if he’s being deliberately obtuse or if he genuinely believes this rewriting of their history.
“Fuck’s sake. Lula. I mean. Fuck’s sake. With her? Of all the people. She’s not even good-looking. She’s literally ugly.”
“She’s not ugly. She’s beautiful.”
He clutches his head. “This is… this is insane, Lula. This isn’t you. You’re not fucking gay. This is her. She’s done this to you. She’s fucking groomed you. Can you not see that? She’s groomed you.”
He paces around for a moment and Tallulah has no idea whether he’s on the edge of calming down and cajoling her into a state of submission, or whether he’s about to kill her. But he does neither of these things. He draws himself up tall and straight, looks directly at her, and says, “You know that’s it now, don’t you? You know you can’t be Noah’s mother anymore. Not now. No court in the world would let a person like you raise a child. No court in the world. I’m going now, Tallulah. I’m going back to the house and I’m taking Noah, and you will never see him again. Do you hear me? You will never see him again.”
He hurls the ring box at her again, and as he turns away, Tallulah feels her head fill with splintered shards of fear and rage. No, says every atom in her body; no, you do not get to take my baby; no, you do not get to take my baby. And she follows behind him, and she screams out, her arms outstretched, ready to pull him back, to stop him doing what he’s doing, going where he’s going. But as she leaves the room she sees that Scarlett is in the doorway in her wet underwear and that she is holding something in her hand, a bronze lump, carved into a shape that somehow resembles a group of people in a huddle, and that she is lifting it backward over her head and then swinging it forward again toward the crown of Zach’s head. She sees the bronze lump hit the back of Zach’s skull. She hears Scarlett’s scream of anger, Zach’s dull yell of pain. And she sees the blow fell him so that he lands in a perfect arc, face-first onto the white granite floor.