by Lisa Jewell
‘Lucy!’ he says, beaming, getting to his feet, sucking in his tanned stomach, trying to cover up the fact that at forty-eight he no longer has the gym-sculpted physique of the thirty-eight-year-old man she’d escaped from ten years earlier. He pulls the earpiece from his ear and heads towards her. ‘Lucy!’ he says again, with added warmth, his arms outstretched.
Lucy recoils.
‘Michael,’ she responds circumspectly, moving away from him.
He takes his outstretched arms to Marco instead and gives him a bear hug. ‘So you told her then?’
Marco nods.
Michael gives him a mock-withering look.
‘And who is this?’ says Michael, turning his attention to Stella who is clinging to Lucy’s leg.
‘This is Stella,’ says Lucy. ‘My daughter.’
‘Wow,’ says Michael. ‘What a beautiful little girl. Lovely to meet you, Stella.’ He offers his hand for her to shake and Lucy resists the temptation to pull Stella from its path.
‘And this is?’ He peers down at the dog.
‘This is Fitzgerald. Or Fitz for short.’
‘For F. Scott?’
‘Yes, for F. Scott.’ She feels the small shot of adrenaline: the memory of the question-and-answer sessions he’d once subjected her to, to show her that she was stupid and uneducated, unworthy of him, lucky to have him. But there had always been something small and hard and certain at her very core reminding her that he was wrong, reminding her that one day she would find her escape and that once she did she would never ever look back. And now here she is nervously answering his questions, about to ask him for money, almost back where she started.
‘Well, hello, Fitz,’ he says, scruffing the dog under his chin. ‘Aren’t you a cute little guy.’ Then he stands back and appraises Lucy and her little family. It’s the same way he used to appraise Lucy when he was considering the possibility of punishing her. That knife edge of time that could end with a laugh and a hug or could end with a broken finger or a Chinese burn.
‘Well, well, well,’ he says, ‘look at you all. You are all just adorable. Can I get you anything? Some juice?’ He looks at Lucy. ‘Are they allowed juice?’
She nods and Michael looks up at the maid who is hanging behind in the shade of the terrace at the back of the house. ‘Joy! Some juice for the children! Thank you! And you, Lucy? Wine? Beer?’
Lucy hasn’t had a drink for weeks. She would die for a beer. But she can’t. She has to keep all her wits about her for the next half an hour or so. She shakes her head. ‘No, thank you. Juice would be fine for me too.’
‘Three juices, Joy. Thank you. And I’ll have another beer. Oh, and some potato chips. Those, erm what are they called, you know, with the ridges? Great.’
He turns his gaze back to Lucy, still playing it wide-eyed and boyish. ‘Sit down, sit down.’
He rearranges the chairs, they sit. ‘So,’ he says, ‘Lucy Lou, how the hell have you been?’
She shrugs and smiles. ‘You know. Getting on with it. Getting older. Getting wiser.’
‘And you’ve been out here, all this time?’
‘Yup.’
‘Never went back to the UK?’
‘Nope.’
‘And your daughter … her father? Are you married?’
‘Nope,’ she says again. ‘We lived together for a couple of years. Then he went back to Algeria to “visit family” about three years ago and we haven’t heard from him since.’
Michael winces as though Stella’s dad’s disappearance was a physical assault upon her. Too ironic to bear. ‘Tough,’ he says. ‘That’s tough. So you’re a single mom?’
‘Yes. I am. Very much so.’
Joy returns with a tray laid with a carafe of chilled orange juice, three glasses on paper coasters, crisps in small silver bowls, tiny paper napkins, straws. Michael pours the juice and passes the glasses to each of them, offers them the ridged crisps. The children pounce on them eagerly.
‘Slow down,’ she hisses.
‘It’s fine,’ says Michael. ‘I have packets and packets of the things. So, where are you living?’
‘Here and there.’
‘And are you still …?’ He mimes playing the fiddle.
She smiles wryly. ‘Well, I was. Yes. Until some drunk English dick on a stag night decided to snatch it off me and then made me chase him and his mates around for half an hour trying to get it back before tossing it over a wall. Now it’s being repaired. Or at least, it has been repaired. But …’ The insides of her mouth are dry with dread. ‘I don’t have the money to pay to collect it.’
He throws her his oh, poor baby look, the one he used to give her after he’d hurt her.
‘How much?’ he says, and he’s already twisting in his seat to locate his wallet in his back pocket.
‘A hundred and ten euros,’ she says, her voice catching slightly.
She watches him peeling off the notes. He folds them in half and passes them to her. ‘There,’ he says. ‘And a little extra. Maybe for a haircut for my boy.’ He scruffs Marco’s hair again. ‘And maybe you too.’ And it’s there, when he glances at her hair, that terrible dark look of disappointment. You’ve let yourself go. You’re not trying hard enough. How can I love you when. You. Don’t. Make. Any. Fucking. Effort.
She takes the folded notes from his hand and feels the almost imperceptible tug as he grips them a little tighter, the hint of a nasty game of control and power. He smiles and loosens his grip. She puts the notes in her shoulder bag and says, ‘Thank you. I’m very grateful. I’ll get it back to you in a couple of weeks. I promise.’
‘No,’ he says, leaning back, spreading his legs a little, smiling darkly. ‘I don’t want it back. But …’
A trickle of coldness runs down Lucy’s spine.
‘Promise me one thing.’
Her smile freezes.
‘I’d love to see you. I mean, more of you. You and Marco. And you too of course.’ He switches his grim gaze to Stella, winking at her. ‘I’m here all summer. Until mid-September. Between jobs. You know.’
‘And your wife, is she …?’
‘Rachel had to go back. She has important business to attend to in the UK.’ He says this in a dismissive tone of voice. Rachel could be a brain surgeon or a politician for all Lucy knows, she might hold the lives of hundreds, thousands in her hands. But as far as Michael is concerned, anything that distracts a woman’s attention away from him for even a moment is some kind of pathetic joke. Including babies.
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That’s a shame.’
‘Not really,’ he says. ‘I needed some space. Because guess what I’m doing …?’
Lucy shakes her head briskly, and smiles.
‘I am writing a book. Or in fact, a memoir. Or possibly a blend of the two. A semi-autobiographical kind of thing. I don’t know yet.’
God, he looks so pleased with himself, Lucy thinks, like he wants her to say, Oh wow, Michael, that’s amazing, you are so clever. Instead she wants to laugh in his face and say, Ha, you, writing a book? Are you serious?
‘That’s great,’ she says. ‘How exciting.’
‘Should be, yes. Although quite a bit of downtime too, I shouldn’t wonder. So it would be just great to see more of you guys. Hang out a bit. Make some use of the pool.’
Lucy’s gaze follows his, towards the pool. She feels her breath catch hard, her lungs expand then shrink, her heart pound at the memory of her head under that perfect teal water, the pressure of his hands on her crown. Pushing her. Pushing her until her lungs nearly exploded. Then suddenly letting her bob to the top, choking, rasping, while he pulled himself from the pool, snatched a towel from a sun lounger, wrapped it around himself and strode back into the house without a backward glance.
‘I could have killed you,’ he said about it afterwards. ‘If I’d wanted. You know that, don’t you? I could have killed you.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ she’d asked.
‘Because I couldn’t be bo
thered.’
‘Well,’ she says now, ‘maybe. Though we’re pretty busy ourselves this summer.’
‘Yes,’ he says patronisingly. ‘I’m sure you are.’
‘You know,’ she says, turning to look at the house, ‘I always thought you must have sold this place. I’ve seen other people living here over the years.’
‘Holiday let,’ he says. And she can hear the shame in his voice, the idea of shiny, incredible, successful, wealthy Michael Rimmer having to stoop so low as to rent out his Antibes holiday home to strangers. ‘Seemed a shame’ – he rallies – ‘to have it sitting empty all the time. When other people could be enjoying it.’
She nods. Lets him hold on to his pathetic little lie. He hates ‘other people’. He will have had the place disinfected from top to bottom before he could have faced returning.
‘Well,’ she says, turning to smile at the children, ‘I think it’s probably time for us to hit the road.’
‘No,’ says Michael. ‘Stay a while! Why not? I can open a bottle of something. The kids can splash in the pool. It’ll be fun.’
‘The music shop will be shutting soon,’ she says, trying not to sound nervous. ‘I really need to pick up my fiddle now, so I can work tonight. But thank you. Thank you so much. What do you say, children?’
They say thank you and Michael beams at them. ‘Beautiful kids,’ he says, ‘really beautiful.’
He sees them to the front door. He looks like he wants to hug Lucy and she rapidly drops to her knees to rearrange the dog’s collar. Michael watches them from the doorway, across the bonnet of his ridiculous car, a smile still playing on his lips.
For a moment Lucy thinks she is going to be sick. She stops and breathes in hard. And then, as they are about to turn the corner, the dog suddenly squats and produces a small pile of crap up against the wall of Michael’s house, right in the path of the afternoon sun. Lucy reaches into her bag for a plastic bag to pick it up with. Then she stops. In an hour the shit will be baked and bubbling like a brie. It will be the first thing he sees next time he leaves his house. He might even step in it.
She leaves it there.
12
Libby was supposed to be going to a friend’s barbecue on Saturday. She’d been looking forward to it. Her friend, April, had told her she was inviting a ‘fit bloke from work. I think you’ll really like him. He’s called Danny.’
But as Saturday dawns, another hot day with a sky full of nothing but blue, the windowpanes already red hot beneath her hand as she pushes them open, Libby has no thoughts of hot Danny or of April’s famous spicy couscous salad or of a glowing orange globe of Aperol Spritz in her hand and her feet in a rubber paddling pool. She has no thoughts of anything other than the mysterious case of Serenity Lamb and the rabbit’s foot.
She texts April.
I’m so so so so sorry. Have an amazing day. Let me know if you’re still going strong this evening and I’ll pop in for a sundowner.
Then she showers and puts on a tropical-print playsuit and open sandals made of gold leather, rubs sun cream into her arms and shoulders, sits her sunglasses on her head, checks her bag for the door keys to the house, and gets the train into London.
Libby puts the key into the padlock on the wooden hoarding and turns it. The padlock slides open and she puts another key into the front door. She half expects a hand on her shoulder, someone to ask her what she’s doing, if she has permission to open this door with these keys.
Then she is in the house. Her house. And she is alone.
She closes the door behind her and the sound of the morning traffic dies away immediately; the burn on her neck cools.
For a moment she stands entirely still.
She pictures the police here, where she stands. They are wearing old-fashioned helmets. She knows what they look like because there were pictures of them in the Guardian article. PCs Ali Shah and John Robbin. They were following up on an anonymous call to the station from a ‘concerned neighbour’. The concerned neighbour had never been traced.
She follows Shah and Robbin’s vanished footsteps into the kitchen. She imagines the smell growing stronger now.
PC Shah recalled the sound of flies. He said he thought someone had left a pair of clippers running, or an electric toothbrush. The bodies, they said, were in the very earliest stages of decay, still recognisable as an attractive, dark-haired, thirty-something woman and an older man with salt and pepper hair. Their hands were linked. Next to them lay the corpse of another man. Fortyish. Tall. Dark hair. They all wore black: the woman a tunic and leggings, the men a kind of robe. The items, it transpired, had been homemade. They’d later found a sewing machine in the back room, remnants of black fabric in a bin.
Apart from the buzzing flies, the house was deathly quiet. The police said they wouldn’t have thought to look for a baby if it hadn’t been for the mention of her on the note left on the dining table. They’d almost missed the dressing room off the master bedroom, but then they’d heard a noise, an ‘ooh’, PC Shah had said.
An ‘ooh’.
Libby steps slowly up the staircase and into the bedroom. She peers around the corner of the door into the dressing room.
And there she’d been! Bonny as anything! That’s what PC Robbin had said. Bonny as anything!
Her flesh crawls slightly at the sight of the painted crib. But she breaks through the discomfort and stares at the crib until she is desensitised. After a moment she feels neutral enough to lay a hand upon it. She pictures the two young policemen, peering over the top of the crib. She imagines herself, in her pure white Babygro, her hair already a full helmet of Shirley Temple curls even at only ten months old, her feet kicking up and down with excitement at the sight of the two friendly faces staring down at her.
‘She tried to stand up,’ said Robbin. ‘She was pulling up at the sides of the cot. Desperate to be taken out. We didn’t know what to do. She was evidence. Should we touch her? Should we call for back-up? We were flummoxed.’
Apparently, they’d decided not to pick her up. PC Shah sang songs to her while they waited to hear what they should do. Libby wished she could remember it; what songs had he sung to her, this kind young policeman? Had he enjoyed singing her the songs? Had he felt embarrassed? According to the article, he’d gone on to have five children of his own, but when he found Serenity Lamb in her crib, he’d had no experience of babies.
A crime scene team soon arrived in the house, including a special officer to collect the baby. Her name was Felicity Measures. She was forty-one at the time. Now she is sixty-five and newly retired, living in the Algarve with her third husband. ‘She was the dearest baby,’ the article quoted her. ‘Golden curls, well fed and cared for. Very smiley and cuddly. Incongruous given the setting in which she’d been left. Which was gothic, really. Yes, it was quite, quite gothic.’
Libby pushes the cot and it creaks pathetically, evidencing its great age. Who was it bought for? she wonders. Was it bought for her? Or for generations of babies before her? Because she now knows there are other players in the story of her. Not just Martina and Henry Lamb, and the mystery man. Not just the missing children. Neighbours had spoken of not two, but ‘numerous’ children, of other people ‘coming and going’. The house was filled with untraceable bloodstains and DNA, with fibres and dropped hairs and strange notes and scribbles on walls and secret panels and a garden full of medicinal herbs, some of which had been used in her parents’ apparent suicide pact.
‘We are setting ourselves free from these broken bodies, from this despicable world, from pain and disappointment. Our baby is called Serenity Lamb. She is ten months old. Please make sure she goes to nice people. Peace, always, HL, ML, DT’, the note by their decaying bodies had said.
Libby leaves the room and slowly wanders the house, seeking out some of the strange things found in the aftermath of the deaths. Whoever else had been in the house the night of the suicides had run, the article said, leaving wardrobe doors flung open, food in the fri
dge, half-read books open on the floor, pieces of paper torn from walls leaving behind their Sellotaped corners.
She finds one of these strips of Sellotape on the wall in the kitchen, yellowed and crisp. She tugs the small shred of paper from it and stares at it for a moment in the palm of her hand. What had been on the piece of paper that the people fleeing this sinking ship had not wanted other eyes to see?
There is a fridge in the country-style kitchen, a huge rusting American-style fridge, cream and beige, probably quite unusual in the UK in the eighties, she imagines. She pulls it open and peers inside. Speckles of mould, a pair of cracked and broken plastic ice trays, nothing more. In the kitchen cupboards she finds empty enamelled tins, a packet of flour so old that it has turned to a brick. There is a set of white teacups, a chrome teapot, ancient pots of herbs and spices, a toast rack, a large tray, painted black. She scratches at the black paint to reveal the silver beneath. She wonders why someone would paint a silver tray black.
And then she stops. She has heard something. Some sort of movement from upstairs. She slides the tray back into the cupboard and stands at the foot of the stairs. She hears the sound again, a sort of dull thump. Her heart quickens. She tiptoes to the landing. There it is again. And again. And then – her heart rate doubles at the sound – someone clears their throat.
Mr Royle, she thinks, it must be Mr Royle, the solicitor. It couldn’t be anyone else. She’d shut the door behind her when she arrived. Definitely.
‘Hello?’ she calls out. ‘Hello. Mr Royle!’
But there is silence. An immediate, deliberate silence.
‘Hello!’ she calls out again.
The silence sits like a still bear at the top of the house. She can almost hear the thump of someone’s pulse.
She thinks of all the other mysteries the magazine article had revealed: the children who fled this house, the person who stayed behind to care for her; she thinks of the scribbles on the walls and the fabric strip hanging from the radiator and the scratches gouged into walls, the awkward note left by her parents, the blue painted roses on the creaking crib, the sheets of paper torn from walls, the bloodstains and the locks on the outsides of the children’s rooms.