by Lisa Jewell
55
SEPTEMBER 2018
The following morning starts early, as is always the way when Shaun has the twins. Jack is first on their bed, trying to steal Shaun’s phone off the bedside table and having a mock battle with him. Lily follows a minute later, her fine brown hair fuzzed up into a thick knot at the back of her head that Sophie knows she will have to spend twenty minutes brushing out before they can leave the house. Over Lily’s shoulder, through a gap in the curtains, Sophie sees an inch of the gray damp day that the forecasters had predicted and she turns to Shaun and says, “Looks like it’s the water park today.” And Shaun peers through the gap in the curtains and sighs and says, “Looks like it.”
The children are delighted and everyone runs downstairs to eat the special breakfasts that Sophie got in for them: fat American pancakes, Nutella, and Coco Pops. Sophie drinks coffee from a big mug, Shaun drinks an espresso from a tiny cup, the children chat and eat and drop Coco Pops on the floor and talk about how if they were at home their dog, Betty, would hoover up the spilled cereal. Rain splashes gently against the windowpanes and for a moment, Sophie feels at one, as though maybe this is how she’s been waiting to feel ever since they first arrived. South London seems distant, and for a moment she thinks that maybe she can do this after all. All they needed was to see the children. Shaun has already lost some of the brittleness he’s been displaying since he started his new job. The harsh haircut he had before they arrived has started to grow out and soften, and he can’t stop smiling, even when the twins are being testy.
She picks up her phone to google the opening times of the leisure center in Manton, and as she does so, a message arrives from Kim.
They’ve got a warrant. They’re going to Dark Place. I feel sick.
Sophie takes a sharp intake of breath, before typing her reply.
Oh my God. That was quick. When will they give you more developments?
They’re just putting a team together. Maybe in a couple of hours? I can’t breathe.
Is there anything I can do?
She knows it’s the wrong thing to have said the minute she presses send.
Could you come over? Maybe. If you’re not busy?
Sophie looks up from her phone. Lily and Jack are standing over the toaster waiting for their second round of pancakes to warm up, Shaun is loading the dishwasher, everyone is still in their pajamas and in varying degrees of unreadiness for the day, the day that was very much intended to be a day about the four of them. She sighs and types, My partner’s kids are here. We’re going to the splash pool in Manton.
She pauses. It sounds so harsh. This woman is possibly on the cusp of discovering that her daughter is dead. Splash pool. Really?
She adds another line, But we’re not going for a while, so I could come over for a little bit.
Thank you so much, Kim replies. I just can’t face being on my own right now.
* * *
Sophie gets to Kim’s half an hour later. Shaun had looked a little confused when she’d tried to explain in as few words as possible where she was going, and why.
“I’ll be back in an hour,” she says as she leaves. “Probably less.”
“But how do you know this woman?”
“From the ring,” she says lightly. “The one I found in the woods. I guess I’ve got a little bit sucked into things with her, you know.”
“Well, don’t be too long, will you?”
“I promise I’ll be back in time to go to swimming.”
Kim looks gray when she opens the door to Sophie. She’s not wearing makeup and her usually shiny hair is hanging in matte ropes over each shoulder.
The sound of children’s TV blares from the living room, where Sophie can see the back of Noah’s head as they pass by. Kim leads her into the kitchen and pulls out a chair for her.
“Tea?”
“Yes. Please.”
Kim fills the kettle from the tap and Sophie hears her sigh.
“Any more word?” she asks.
“No, not yet. This is the worst feeling. I can’t bear it.”
Kim’s shoulders look small and pointy through the cotton of her long-sleeved top and Sophie wants to touch her, comfort her, but she doesn’t know her well enough.
“It’s going to happen,” says Kim. “They’re going to open that slab in that tower, they’re going to go down there, and they’re going to find something. I know they are. And it could be something that breaks my world apart completely. And I’m not sure I’m ready for that. I’m not sure I’ll ever, ever be ready for that. I want it to happen but I don’t want it to happen. And I need to know, but I don’t want to know. What if she’s down there? My baby girl. What if she’s down there? With spiders. You know, she suffers from arachnophobia. She’s terrified of spiders. Literally to the point where she can’t breathe if she sees one, where she would physically shake. And what if someone locked her down there, with spiders. In the dark. Alone. That’s what I can’t bear. The idea of her being down there, alone…”
And then Kim starts to cry and Sophie gets to her feet and encircles her in her arms and says, “Oh Kim. Oh Kim. I’m so sorry. This must be so tough. So tough.” The kettle comes to a boil and clicks off but Kim does not make the tea; instead, she collapses onto a chair and stares at the clock on the kitchen wall as it turns from 10:01 a.m. to 10:02 a.m.
Then Kim’s phone buzzes and Sophie can see from here the name Dom flash up on her screen.
* * *
Kim straps Noah into his car seat in the back of her car while Sophie gets into the passenger seat. She takes out her phone and messages Shaun.
Kim and I are going to Dark Place. Apparently they’ve found something.
Her message goes unread until they are almost out of the village, when Shaun replies with, Oh God. I hope it’s nothing too awful. We’ll wait here till we hear from you.
Kim drives hard through the country lanes outside the village and then rather too fast up the tiny lane that leads to Dark Place. There’s a female police officer in high-vis standing at the gates to the house and Kim winds down her window and says, “DI McCoy told me to come. I’m Tallulah Murray’s mother.”
The officer lets her through the gates and they drive up the potholed driveway to the front of the house, which is circled with marked and unmarked police cars. Another police officer approaches them and Kim once again winds down her window and explains who she is and the police officer talks into a walkie-talkie and then asks her to wait in the car for a moment.
The front door of the house is wide-open. Inside Sophie can see an elegant marble hallway with a creamy stone staircase circling through the middle to a glass balustrade above, with a huge modernist chandelier hanging at its center. The walls are hung with abstract art and at the base of the staircase there is a pair of 1960s leather lounging chairs facing each other across a low coffee table. It’s exquisitely tasteful, a perfect blend of old and new. But this beautiful house has been left abandoned for more than a year, and now, finally, everyone will know why.
Dom appears at the front door a moment later and Kim steps immediately out of her car and heads toward him. Sophie would like to follow but needs to stay in the car with Noah, so she opens her door and swivels around so that she is half in and half out of the car. She watches as Dom says something to Kim and then she sees Kim’s body crumple at the knees and Dom and another man bring her back to standing with a hand under each elbow, before Dom takes her into his arms and holds on to her hard.
Sophie turns and looks at Noah. “I’m just going to check your nana’s OK, all right? I won’t be long. You just wait there, like a good, good boy. OK?”
Noah stares at her and then sticks out his tongue and blows her a raspberry, and she starts slightly. No child has ever blown a raspberry at her before and the classroom assistant inside her would like to react to it in some way. But instead she ignores it and strides toward the front door.
She rests a hand gently on the small of Kim’s bac
k and says, “Kim? What’s happened?”
And Kim is breathing too hard to speak so Dom speaks for her and says, “We’ve just got into the tunnel. There are human remains down there.”
Sophie feels a veil fall across her vision and wobbles slightly. “Is there any idea yet whose remains?”
“No. Not yet. But Kim,” he says, turning to address her, “you should know that it is a male.”
Kim sobs. A choking sound.
“And we found this, as well.” He holds up a sealed clear plastic bag. “Are you able to identify it, Kim?”
Sophie looks at the object in the bag. It’s a phone in a clear plastic case with some kind of design printed on it. She feels Kim’s shoulders crumple under her hand and she hears a noise come from Kim that she has never heard before, half banshee wail, half feral growl, and Kim collapses onto her knees there on the graveled driveway and says, “No, no, no, no, no, no, not my baby. No, no, no, no, not my beautiful baby girl.”
In the backseat of Kim’s car Noah starts to scream and cry and soon the damp air is filled with the sounds of raw human agony being played out in stereo and everyone else falls completely silent.
56
JUNE 2017
“Zach?”
Tallulah shoves at his shoulder.
“Zach?”
His body seems oddly solid and resistant, she thinks, as though it has been emptied and refilled with ball bearings.
“Zach?” she hisses into his ear. “Oh. Fuck. Zach.”
She puts her face to his face, which is turned at a strange angle, and feels for breath from his mouth and nose. But there is nothing. She tries to move him onto his back but he is too heavy. There is a small patch of blood on the tile beneath his cheeks and she sees a trickle coming from his ear canal.
“Oh my God. Scarlett. What have you done?”
Scarlett throws her a look of dismay. “He was going to take your baby, Lula! He was going to take your baby!”
“Yes. But you didn’t need to… oh my God!” Tallulah gets to her feet and she stares from Scarlett to Zach and back again. “Scarlett. He’s dead. Oh Jesus Christ. Scarlett.”
“You told me you wanted him to disappear, Lula. You told me that. Remember? You said you wished he could just disappear. That it would easier. I heard what he said about the baby and I heard him threatening you and I just…”
They both look up at a clicking noise across the kitchen tiles and see that it is Toby. He looks at them inquisitively, and then pads toward Zach’s body. He sniffs the toes of his bare foot and then sits down and looks at Tallulah. Behind him another figure appears: a middle-aged woman with a silken kimono wrapped around her small frame, a pale pink eye mask pushed halfway up her forehead.
The woman squints and grimaces at the tableau in front of her. Then she peels off the eye mask and says, “I just came down to ask you kids to turn down the pool music. What the hell is going on?”
Tallulah can’t speak. She shakes her head.
“Oh Christ.” The woman strides toward Zach’s body. “Who is he? Who are you? Who is this, Scarlett?” The woman’s eyes go to the object in Scarlett’s hand. “Oh,” she says, sadly and somewhat theatrically. “Not my Pipin.”
Tallulah shakes her head again. Pipin?
The woman leans down toward Zach’s face and says again, “Please can someone tell me who the hell this is?” She places two fingers to the underside of his neck and peers into his eyes.
“He’s… Zach,” says Tallulah. “He’s, he’s my boyfriend.”
“And you are?”
“Tallulah. I’m Tallulah.”
“Oh Christ. He’s dead,” says the woman. “Will one of you please tell me what’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” says Scarlett, looking from the strange metal object in her hand that her mother called her “Pipin” to the lifeless form of Zach and back again. “I don’t know. He was going—he was going to take Noah. And then—”
“Who’s Noah?” asks the woman with a sigh.
Scarlett replies, “Noah is Lula’s baby. He was going to take him away from her. And then…” Her eyes drop to the Pipin again and she stops talking.
There’s a black square in Tallulah’s head over the space where the memory of what just happened should be, like a redaction. She can remember chasing Zach into the kitchen. She can remember the dog walking into the kitchen and sniffing Zach’s toes. In between a thing happened. A terrible thing. It flashes through her head like a lightning bolt. She starts to cry. “Oh,” she says in a tiny, tiny voice. “Oh.” She puts her hands over her mouth and starts to rock. “Oh.”
“So, right. Let’s think straight,” says Scarlett’s mother. “The time is…” She turns to look at the big metal clock on the wall. “Just after two a.m. Who else is here?”
“Just Mimi. Liam and Lexie have gone.”
“And where’s Mimi?”
“I don’t know. She came inside a few minutes ago. To charge her phone, she said.”
“So it’s just us. And this boy, this Zach, was he trying to hurt you?”
Tallulah shakes her head. “No,” she says. “He was leaving.”
“Has he ever hurt you?”
“No,” she says. “No, he’s never hurt me.”
“And you, Scarlett. Has he ever hurt you?”
Scarlett shakes her head sullenly.
“And did you think he was going to hurt you?”
She shakes her head again.
“So, you hit him on the head from behind because he said he was going to take your friend’s baby?”
“Yes.”
“And why was he going to take your baby?” she asks Tallulah.
“Because… I told him…” She looks at Scarlett, who nods, just once. “I told him that I was in love with Scarlett.”
She waits to see what this pronouncement does to the perfect angles of Scarlett’s mother’s face, but it does nothing. Her face does not move in any way or register any kind of reaction. Instead, she simply sighs and says, “OK. So he was angry. And hurt. And maybe slightly disgusted. He said he was going to take your baby. He went to leave and then…” All three of them look again at the body on the floor.
For a moment, nobody says anything. Then Scarlett’s mother sighs and says, “What a fucking mess. Right. Who knows you two were here?” she asks Tallulah.
Tallulah tries to arrange her thoughts. “Er, nobody. My mum knows I’m at someone’s house, but I didn’t tell her whose.”
“And what about your friends, Scarlett?”
“Well, they all knew because we were all at the pub together. And Liam and Lexie, obviously, because they were here. And Mimi. And maybe some other people.”
“Right, so eventually, people are going to realize that something’s up when this boy doesn’t come home.”
Tallulah nods and thinks of her mother and thinks of her baby and thinks of her bed and thinks that all she wants is her baby and her mother and her bed.
“What time was your mother expecting you home?” Scarlett’s mother asks Tallulah.
“I don’t know, really. No particular time.”
“Right, so we have a few hours at least before we need to make an account of ourselves.”
“Aren’t we going to call the police?” Tallulah asks.
“What? No. This is manslaughter. Scarlett will end up in prison. You too, probably. And you’ll never see your baby grow up. No, this is a disaster, this is an absolute fucking disaster.” She puts her hands on her hips and surveys the area. “So,” she begins. “Mimi. What are we going to do about Mimi? Where is she?”
“I told you. I don’t know. She came indoors to charge her phone.”
“Go and find her,” she says to Scarlett, without turning around. She goes to the sink, pours herself a glass of water, and knocks back two painkillers with it. “Urgh. My head.”
Scarlett nods and disappears. Then for a moment or two, it is just Tallulah, Scarlett’s mother, and the dog. “Well, l
ife is never dull with Scarlett around, that’s for sure,” says her mother. “Jesus Christ. One thing after another after another. From the moment she was born. I was so excited when I found out I was having a girl after the whirlwind of Rex. I thought it would be all calm afternoons doing crafts and playing with each other’s hair. But no, Scarlett was even worse than Rex, if anything, always wanting to be outdoors, always wanting to run, to disobey, to talk. Oh my God, to talk.” She rests a delicate hand against her cheekbone and then rubs it across her forehead. “Such a nightmare of a child. And then the teenage years. Oh my goodness. The boys—you know, she lost her virginity when she was thirteen. Thirteen. She was obsessed with boys. Then came the girls. Then more boys. More girls. Always being suspended from school after school. Never where she said she was going to be. Never cared, that was the thing. As much as I broke the rules when I was a teenager, I always cared about the consequences. But Scarlett never did. And what can you do with a child like that?”
Scarlett returns. “She’s out cold on my bed,” she says.
“Good,” says Scarlett’s mother. “Leave her there. OK. Now. First things first. We need to get rid of him.”
Tallulah shakes her head. Although she is almost entirely numb, she also can’t quite accept that Zach is now an object, that he is no different from the strange piece of bronze on the floor next to him, the Pipin, a thing to be got rid of. It feels wrong. She battles with these sickening, dizzying emotions for a short moment, trying to untwine them from one another, then feels weak with the realization that there is only one solution and it is the one that Scarlett’s mother is suggesting.