by Lisa Jewell
She sees Scarlett and her mother exchange a look, an almost imperceptible nod. “The tunnel?” says her mother.
“Yes,” says Scarlett. “The tunnel.”
57
SEPTEMBER 2018
Kim and Sophie are sent away before the body bag is brought from the house. Noah has cried himself into a stupefied sleep and is snoring gently in the backseat as they turn onto the main road back to the village.
Kim’s hands grip the steering wheel hard, her knuckles like nubs of ivory through her skin. “Those people,” she says. “That woman. That girl. I knew. I knew when I was there. They were bad people. I could feel it in my gut. You know? That house, it had badness in it. Even on that perfect summer’s day. And there they were! In the swimming pool! Laughing! Drinking beer! It sickens me. But why? Why, for God’s sake? And then to carry on living there for weeks afterward. With that… down there…” Kim starts to cry again.
“Shall we pull over?” Sophie suggests softly. “Just for a minute.”
Kim nods and signals and tucks the car into the curb. She flops her head onto the steering wheel and cries for a short while. After a minute or two she pulls herself together and moves the car back into the traffic and back toward the village.
* * *
At Kim’s house, Sophie messages Shaun.
They found a body. A male. And Tallulah’s mobile phone. I’m waiting with Kim until there’s news. I’ll stay in touch.
Shaun replies simply with OK and a kiss.
Kim sits in the kitchen with Noah and gives him something to eat while Sophie sits in the living room, looking around her at the photos in frames on shelves and on the walls, all of which show a family that was once unexceptional, in every way other than in their happiness. Tallulah is a pretty girl, but looks like the sort of girl who likes to blend into the background, who doesn’t like compliments or fuss, the sort of girl who likes routine and normality and simple food, who doesn’t experiment with clothes or makeup in case she gets it wrong. Yet somehow she found herself embroiled in a Bohemian, self-centered family like the Jacqueses. How did it happen? When did it happen? And why did it end the way it appears to have ended?
She checks her phone for messages, for updates. She goes to the link for Mimi’s YouTube video again to see if she’s uploaded anything new. But the video is gone. The whole account is gone. Mimi has been made to disappear by Scarlett Jacques, still somehow wielding her inexplicable power from a boat in the middle of an ocean.
58
JUNE 2017
The slab lands in place over the steps down to the tunnel and Scarlett locks it into place with the old lever. All three of them are sweaty and gray. They get to their feet and rub their hands down their legs. The air in this tiny damp turret is thick with the smell of old alcohol, sweat, and fear.
The dog is waiting anxiously outside the door to the anteroom, whining gently under his breath. He follows them into the kitchen, where the tiny puddle of blood sits in the middle of the floor like a splash of spilled Beaujolais. Scarlett’s mum mops it up with kitchen paper and spray bleach and then burns the paper over the sink before swirling the ashes down the plug hole and cleaning the sink with more spray.
It is nearly 3:00 a.m. The glass of the sliding doors reflects the LED lights from the swimming pool, which swirl slowly from pale pink to hot pink to purple to blue.
Tallulah sits heavily on the edge of the big leather sofa and says, very quietly, “Can I go home now?”
“No,” Scarlett’s mother replies immediately and firmly. “No. You are in a state of shock. If you go home now, your mother will know. I can’t let you go anywhere until we’ve fixed this. OK?”
Tallulah stares at her and a thousand objections jump to the surface of her consciousness. But she is so tired. So tired. And all she wants to do is sleep. She watches in a kind of blank fascination as Scarlett’s mother makes them hot chocolate in a saucepan. “God,” she is saying. “Just what we need with Rex coming home tomorrow. And Majorca next week. Life,” she says, stirring the chocolate slowly with a wooden spoon. “Life.”
She pours the hot chocolate into mugs and passes one to each of the girls.
“There,” she says. “Drink that.”
The hot chocolate is delicious, creamy, smooth, but with a strangely chemical taste to it.
“I’ve put a tot of rum in it,” Scarlett’s mother explains, “just to calm your stomachs. You must both be so, so exhausted. All that adrenaline. You know, adrenaline is terribly aging. It’s a miracle hormone, but it’s terrible for you. In the long run…”
Tallulah watches Scarlett’s mother’s mouth moving as she talks, and as she watches, a kind of disconnect occurs, the words no longer match the shapes her mouth is making, they start to sound weird, elongated, as though they’re on a DJ’s decks and they’re being slowed right down and dragged out of shape, and Tallulah’s eyes, her eyes are so heavy and she wants to close her eyes but she wants to keep them open because she needs to stay awake, but she can’t stay awake and then all the lights in the room funnel inward toward the backs of her retinas and then…
* * *
When Tallulah opens her eyes, it is dark. And cold. Her body sings out with aches and pains and her mouth is so dry that at first she cannot remove her tongue from behind her teeth. As her eyes grow accustomed to the dark, she sees the flicker of a candle in a jar. She sees the outline of a large plastic bottle of water and she opens it and drinks from it greedily. She is wrapped in fur blankets and there is a pillow and there is chocolate and expensive-looking biscuits and a toilet roll and a bucket. Along the tunnel is a humped form and she knows that it is Zach and she knows that she is under the house, and that above her is solid stone, and that she is trapped down here with the dead body of her boyfriend.
There is a box of matches and more candles in a box. And there is her phone. She switches it on but there is no signal down here and she has only 16 percent of her charge left.
She puts the phone back down and as she does she feels something run across the skin of her bare ankle. She looks down and sees a spider, sitting on her flesh, all angles and legs and coiled energy, and she jumps to her feet and she screams and she screams and she screams.
59
SEPTEMBER 2018
The morning drifts slowly toward lunchtime and Kim says, “You can go now, Sophie. I’m OK here now. Ryan’s on his way.”
“Ryan?”
“My son. I’ve been trying to get hold of him all morning. Had his phone on silent.” She rolls her eyes. “But he’ll be here in a minute. You go. I’ll be fine.”
Sophie waits for Kim’s son to arrive; when he does, a few minutes later, he immediately collapses into his mother’s arms and starts to cry and Sophie closes the door quietly behind her and heads back toward the Maypole.
A figure across the common is also walking toward the school and it takes a moment for Sophie to realize that it is Lexie. She’s carrying shopping bags, on her way back from the co-op. She slows down to wait for her to catch up and then greets her with a tight smile.
“They’ve found something,” she says to Lexie. “In the secret tunnel at Dark Place.”
Lexie’s jaw drops and her eyes open wide. “Oh my God,” she says. “Is it him?”
“Him? Who?”
“The boy. Zach.”
“What makes you think that?” she asks carefully.
“Well, if the police have found something. And that was the last place they were seen…?”
“ ‘They’? But you said ‘him.’ The boy. As if…” She stops and then pulls in her breath. “Lexie,” she says, “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, and I’m not insinuating anything here, I promise, but… I saw you had a copy of my book in your suitcase yesterday and I think you know that there’s a passage in the book about a detective finding a cardboard sign just like the ones here and it seems like such a weird coincidence. I mean, the ‘Dig Here’ signs? Did you have anything to do with them?�
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Behind them the church bell rings, just once. The question sticks in the air between them, thick and raw, like a clamp holding open an incision.
Lexie doesn’t answer at first. And then, almost imperceptibly, she nods.
60
JUNE 2017
Tallulah doesn’t know how long she’s been down here. The last time she switched on her phone before it finally ran out of charge, it was 10:48 on Saturday night. It feels as if another six hours at least have passed since then. It must be early on Sunday morning, more than twenty-four hours since she drank the drugged hot chocolate given to her by Scarlett’s mother. Twenty-four hours since whatever happened, happened. The thing that happened when Zach threatened to take her baby away. The thing that means Zach is dead.
She closes her eyes again and then again, trying to bring that moment back into focus—and it never does. She’s sure it was Scarlett who did it. She sees the metal lump in Scarlett’s hands. She sees Zach on the floor. But then she feels the thrum of her own adrenaline around her own body, the thump of her own heart under her own rib cage, and she doesn’t know what happened just before. Just before.
The fur blanket is wrapped high up her neck; she has made a spider-proof bag out of it, but still she feels the shiver of tiny feet on her flesh. She feels them in the places that the blanket doesn’t cover: her eyes, her nostrils; climbing into her ear canals. She’s needed to go to the toilet for hours now but is holding it, too scared to unwrap herself from her cocoon. She’s thirsty but she doesn’t want to drink the water because it will make her need to go more. She eats the biscuits instead. She hasn’t moved for hours and all her joints ache.
She assumes, because she is alive, because she has been left with food and water and light and a blanket, that she is to be rescued, that she is down here temporarily. But she can’t be sure. The thought of being wrong, the thought that she might die down here, is too much for her brain to process.
An hour goes by. Maybe longer. The need to go to the toilet has passed again. She imagines that her body has somehow absorbed the contents of her bladder, like a sponge. She braves sticking an arm out of the furry rug and lifts the candle up, lets the light it casts run down the tunnel, over the hump of Zach’s body. There are lamps at intervals attached to the walls and she marvels briefly at the age of them, imagines them lit and guiding escapees toward safety. She wonders how far the tunnel goes. She wonders if there’s an exit at the other end, an escape hatch. But in order to find out she’d have to take off the blanket and she does not want to take off the blanket. Because there are spiders.
* * *
A crack of light appears above Tallulah’s head. She’s been sitting on the steps, as close as possible to the opening in the room above, as far away as possible from the spiders on the tunnel floor and Zach’s dead body. She doesn’t know how long it’s been. Long enough to burn through a second candle. To have finished the biscuits. To have finished the water. To have slept twice. She turns at the sound of the stone lid creaking open and peers up.
“Shh!”
It’s Scarlett. It takes a few seconds for Tallulah’s eyes to adjust enough to make out the slice of her face visible through the crack.
“Shh,” she says again. Then she says, “Are you OK?”
Tallulah tries to talk but no words come. She shakes her head.
“Look,” says Scarlett. “We’re going to get you out of here. Just one more day, I think. Police everywhere still. But I’m pretty sure they’re done with us. And then…”
“What about Noah?” she croaks.
“Noah’s fine. I saw him. He’s fine. Your mum’s fine. Listen, Tallulah. It’s going to be OK? Yes? Just hold on in there. And look what I got for you. It’s a pecan Danish. Your favorite.” She passes something wrapped in a kitchen towel through the gap and Tallulah takes it. “Do you need more water? Anything else?”
“I want to get out,” she says, her voice still cracking, but growing stronger. “I want to get out now. I want to go home. I can’t be down here, with Zach, with his… I just can’t. And there’s spiders. Please. Let me out. I can’t… It’s…”
She sees Scarlett put a finger to her mouth, her eyes track quickly back behind her. “Shh,” she says again, before sliding the stone cover back into place.
And then it is dark again.
PART FIVE
61
SEPTEMBER 2018
POLICE TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH AMELIA BOO RHODES
8 September 2018
Manton Police Station
In attendance:
DI Dominic McCoy
DCI Aisha Butt
DI McCoy: Amelia, or would you prefer Mimi?
Amelia Rhodes: Mimi. Please.
DM: OK, Mimi. Thank you for coming in, of your own volition.
AR: I’ve been wanting to say something for ages. For months. So long. But… I was too scared.
DM: Scared of what, Mimi?
AR: Scared of… It’s hard. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s Scarlett. She’s got this kind of… power?
DM: Can you explain a little what you mean by that?
AR: I just mean… I don’t know. She just has this way of making you think that you’d be nothing without her. It’s like, being with her is amazing and exciting, but there’s always the threat that she would cut you out, just like that, if you displeased her. So you just never wanted to displease her.
DM: When did you first meet Scarlett Jacques?
AR: At Maypole House. When I was sixteen. We were both doing art A level. And textile design. So we were in a lot of the same lesson groups.
DM: And had you known her before that?
AR: [doesn’t reply]
DM: Could you say yes or no, please? For the recording?
AR: No. I’d never met her before. But we hit it off, like, immediately. She was just, kind of, exciting to be around. Everyone wanted to be friends with her, and she chose me. And once Scarlett had chosen you, you were hers for life. Or that’s what it felt like. I mean—all of us, me, Ruby, Jayden, Rocky—we all followed her to Manton. We could have gone to other colleges. Especially Jayden and Rocky—they were, like, geniuses, Jayden could have got into the Royal College and Rocky got a place at the London College of Fashion. They were so talented. But they went to Manton. Because that’s where Scarlett went. It’s kind of lame, really, when you think about it. When you look back on it. But she just had this way of making you feel as if your life would be meaningless without her. Not in anything she did. She never did anything bad. Just in the way she made you feel… I can’t explain it. It’s weird. Like she needed you. But also like you needed her more.
DM: And so, going back to the night of 16 June 2017. Please can you tell me, in your own words, exactly what happened?
AR: Erm, from, like, the pub?
DM: Yes. Start at the pub.
AR: It was a Friday. We all met up at the Swan & Ducks. In the village. Just a fun, normal night. The whole crew. Plus Scarlett’s ex Liam. We all sat outside, had a few drinks. Then Scarlett went in to get a round and she didn’t come back. So we went in to find her and she was sitting with them. With Tallulah and her boyfriend. Really weird atmosphere. Really tense.
DM: As far as you were aware, was there anything going on between Scarlett and Tallulah?
AR: Kind of. Yeah. We used to talk about it, their friendship. It seemed strange. Like, I don’t want to sound horrible, but Tallulah just wasn’t like… us. You know? She was very quiet, dressed very, like, ordinary. She was nice and everything, but I never really understood why Scarlett wanted to hang out with her. Then Ruby said she saw something, in the college grounds, the two of them holding hands when they thought no one was looking, and then after that we assumed that something was going on, or something had gone on. But she never told us and we never saw anything else. So, you know…
DM: And then, at the pub?
AR: Yes. So, we all ended up sitting with them and we all got quite drun
k. Then Jayden, Rocky, and Roo all left; Roo’s dad was coming to pick her up and Jayden and Rocky were lodging with Roo. So it was just us and Liam, and then Lexie came over too and she drove us over to Scar’s house…
AR: [pauses]
DM: Carry on.
AR: Yeah. Sorry. So, erm… we went back to hers and we had beer and smoked some draw and played in the pool and then Zach and Tallulah went indoors and I went in a bit after, to go and charge my phone, and I could hear raised voices from the snug off the kitchen and I peered through a gap in the sliding door and I saw Zach kind of manhandling Tallulah. They were having a row. Zach was saying to Tallulah that he’d been going to ask her to marry him, I think. And then he threw the ring at her. I stopped watching then, backed away and then went to charge my phone, but there were no Android chargers in the kitchen and I had one in my bag upstairs in Scar’s room, so I went up there to get it. It took me a while to find it. So then I came back down with the charger and I was still on the stairs… and I heard
AR: [pauses]
DM: Are you OK? Do you need a minute?
AR: No. It’s OK. I heard Tallulah shouting, What have you done? And Scarlett saying something like, You wanted this, you said you wanted him to disappear. And I nearly went into the kitchen. But I didn’t. I don’t know why. But it was like—it was Scarlett. Something bad had happened and I was scared for Scarlett to know that I’d seen it. I was scared of Scarlett. You know? So I ran back up the stairs and was going to grab my clothes and my overnight bag and run. But then I heard her coming up the stairs so I flung myself under the covers on her bed and pretended to be asleep. I lay there like that for hours. I kept expecting to hear sirens or something, or for Scarlett to come up and tell me what was going on. I kept expecting something to happen. But it just didn’t. It was silent. Like nothing had ever happened. I saw the sun come up, and then, at about six o’clock, I shoved all my stuff in my bag and came downstairs. I went into the kitchen. It was empty. I looked in the snug and Scarlett was out cold on the sofa in there. I tried to wake her, but it was like she was unconscious. I shook her so hard and she didn’t wake up. And then I saw this little black box. It was a ring. On the floor. It was the one Zach had thrown at Tallulah. And I picked it up and shoved it in my bag. I don’t know why. I just thought