They couldn’t even share with me that this horrendous campaign of crime had been going on.
Oh, Sophia, what is the point of you? Why are you even alive at all?
‘Soph … are you all right? You’re scaring me.’
I looked up at him, at his kind face. ‘I’m fine,’ I said.
‘About those CCTV cameras – I’ve installed them, by the way. You’ll see them properly tomorrow, but I still think you should stay at ours tonight.’
I nodded. He had no need to worry. I had no intention of sleeping in my parents’ house that night. My mum hadn’t imagined the burglaries, after all, so the CCTV would still come in handy.
‘And we need to think about putting locks on the windows and fixing the pane of glass in the door,’ continued Rowan. ‘You know, before your dad comes home.’
I breathed out. ‘Yeah. I can get started on that.’
‘You know, Soph, we are going to get through this. We’re going to be OK. Yeah?’
I raised my eyes to his and nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘I’m going to get your dad a cup of tea, because he’ll be wondering where we are. You get yourself sorted and come back in.’
‘Yeah. And thanks, Rowan.’
‘Oh, it’s nothing …’
‘It’s not nothing.’ My face was burning as I owned the truth of this. ‘You’ve been there for them when I haven’t. Thank you.’
His kiss on my cheek was warm and soft.
‘I told you already. Think nothing of it. See you in a minute.’
He got up and left, while I sprawled in one of the cheap chairs, my eyes shut.
So my mum really had killed herself.
I had not, in a million years, thought my dad would confirm this when he woke up, but perhaps I should have expected it.
It’s of a piece, after all.
I kept telling everyone how it couldn’t possibly be true, ‘because you don’t understand, I knew her’, and then it keeps being proved to me, in a thousand different ways, that I didn’t know my mum at all.
I stirred in my chair.
But I didn’t imagine those people on the train.
And all this started once she sent the book to Paracelsus.
I sat upright, my tears drying.
They may not have hanged my mother, but the Order of Ascendants had strung the noose.
Whatever happened, I was going to find that third notebook.
* * *
There was one last task for me that night.
‘Hello?’ Her voice was strained, and I had the sense she was trying to convey with her opening greeting that whoever I was, I was calling far too late in the evening.
‘Oh, hello. Estella? This is Sophia Mackenzie.’
‘Oh.’
Silence.
Well, nice to hear from you, too.
‘It’s just to say, since you wanted to know, my dad woke up today. They think he’s going to be fine.’
More silence.
‘They’re talking about him coming home in a week,’ I said, exhausted and becoming more and more thrown by her strange reaction. ‘So that will be a relief.’
‘Yes. I imagine it would be.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It was touch and go for a while there.’
‘Right. Well. Thank you for letting us know, Sophia. Have a pleasant evening.’
‘Um, yeah. Thanks. You, too. Oh wait, I just wanted to ask—’
The click as she replaced the receiver seemed very loud.
‘Oh,’ I said aloud, trying to persuade myself it had been a mistake, that Estella had not hung up on me mid-speech. And when my phone rang again, I felt a shiver of relief: this was her calling back to explain we’d been cut off, and my sense of unease was all for nothing.
‘Hi, Estella?’
Silence. No, not complete silence. There was some kind of ambient sound, of very light breathing – taut, controlled, as though the person on the other end of the phone was fighting some strong emotion.
I looked at the number. It wasn’t Estella’s, instead it read, ‘NO CALLER ID’.
‘Hello?’
Nothing.
‘Hello, is somebody there? I can hear you.’
No reply.
The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck were gently rising.
‘I’m going to hang up now,’ I said, with more affronted determination than I felt.
Nothing.
And then, just as my finger moved to end the call, there was the beep, and it was over.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Rowan had been as good as his word. As we swept past Eden Gardens in my car on the way home from the hospital, I could see the rectangular box of the CCTV camera on top of the gate in the moonlight, pointing down at the main entrance.
‘How many did you say there are?’ I was so tired I could barely concentrate on the road; a little conversation wouldn’t hurt. And there had been something about seeing it perched up there, next to the top of the gatepost – a friendly eye watching my affairs, watching my back – that comforted me.
Rowan pursed his lips. ‘There are four outdoor ones. That one is aimed at the gate, the other one at the café, one at the front of the house and one at the back.’ He ticked them off on his large fingers. ‘And I have a confession to make.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, offering me a sidelong grin. ‘I went mad and got two indoor ones, too. One for the café and the other one for the shed. Indoor ones are cheaper because they don’t have to withstand the elements the same way, so it was only another hundred quid for both of them.’
I nodded vaguely.
‘It’s all done in the cloud,’ he said. ‘So you don’t need TV screens or a video recorder. You just log in to your account and you can see it on any device, like your phone or your laptop.’ He yawned hugely. ‘’Scuse me,’ he said, blinking in tiredness.
‘Anyway, they keep the footage for a month then delete it. Dead clever, really.’
‘It’s amazing what they can do nowadays.’ I was too exhausted to speak in anything other than commonplaces and small talk. The white lines on the road were all I was capable of following. On all sides the thick, leafy underbrush and overshadowing trees surrounded us as we sped along, blocking out the moon.
‘I would have got one for inside the house, too, but thought I’d better run it past you beforehand, like.’ He offered me a huge, cheeky grin. ‘If you were going to be streamed to my laptop in the cottage, you’d probably want fair warning before you gave us all an eyeful.’
And in my tired, almost dreamlike state, something about this hit home.
Something about cameras and being filmed.
‘Sophia?’
There was something huge here, some essential point I was missing.
‘Soph? Did I say the wrong thing?’
But I couldn’t put my hand on it. It kept shooting away and evading the tips of my fingers.
‘SOPHIA!’
His hand was on the wheel. I came back to myself – I was rolling away from the white lines, the green underbrush scraping the Ford KA, sand and gravel under my front wheel, about to hit the trees on the final bend before the cottage.
I jammed on the brakes, throwing us both forward into our seatbelts with a painful jerk.
There were at least three seconds of silence while we contemplated our brush with death.
A few feet in front of us, the trees were tall, straight and blameless.
This was all down to me.
‘Oh God, Rowan, I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ he said, in a tightly controlled voice that very much implied it wasn’t. ‘But if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll drive.’
‘There’s no need. Sorry. I … I just thought of something, I’ve forgotten, it doesn’t matter now, and—’
‘Sophia …’
‘No, it’s OK. It’s literally two minutes. I’m just so tired. I need to get to bed. I have to go back to
London again tomorrow and—’
‘Stop right there. You are going nowhere. This is fucking nuts, and you’re going to get yourself killed.’ He threw off the seatbelt with a snap and jerked open the door on his side.
‘What are you …?’
He crossed the front of the car, lit in hectic white by the headlights.
‘Rowan?’
He pulled my door open.
‘Keys.’
‘Rowan, I … don’t be like this. I’m sorry …’
‘I know you are. I do know you’re sorry. But you are also stubborn as fuck and completely insane.’ He flung out an arm, pointing back up the road. ‘Sophia, no one could possibly live like this, commuting hundreds of miles and working and looking after your dad. With all this drama going on something has to give – you’re a fucking time bomb waiting to go off. You’re going to give me the keys now.’
He held his hand out in front of me.
I turned off the ignition and dropped the keys into his hand.
He grunted. ‘Right. Good. Out.’
Shamefacedly I shuffled out of my seat and into the passenger seat, strapping myself in.
He turned the key with a vicious twist that made my KA grind in pain.
I winced.
‘Be nicer to my car, Mr Heavy Hands.’
He raised an eyebrow at me. We moved off with a little jerk of the accelerator.
I tried and tried, but could not recall what had distracted me as he drove. It was too late, and it was too gone, and in a minute or so I was fast asleep.
* * *
Somehow I had been woken and guided into the house, and then Kayleigh was there, in what my exhausted, semi-dreaming memory interpreted as a plush dove-grey dressing grown. It felt soft against my arm as she led me upstairs to the little bedroom papered in Pokémon and the characters from Frozen.
‘Thanks, Kayleigh. G’night.’
She kissed me on the top of my head. ‘Get to sleep, Sophia. You need to rest.’
I collapsed on to the tiny bed, my eyes fluttering closed. I was just switching my phone to mute, so it wouldn’t wake the house in the morning with the alarm, when it went off, startling me. I rolled over on the bed and picked it up, light-headed with exhaustion. It was a central London number and I let relief flood through me. ‘Max?’
‘Um, no,’ the voice was female, tentative, with a slight West Country accent. ‘Not Max. Is this Sophia?’
I frowned at my phone. What stranger would be calling me at eleven at night? ‘Yes,’ I said, with a touch of anxiety. ‘Who’s this?’
‘Ah. Well.’ There was a long intake of breath, like someone preparing themselves for a difficult or unpleasant task. ‘You don’t know me, but I knew your mum. My name’s Tess Hotchkiss. I was in the Order of Ascendants. With Nina.’ I could hear her swallow, her throat dry with nerves. ‘Max Clarke just gave me your mobile number … I hope you don’t mind. He said you wanted to speak to me. You have questions, I suppose.’
Suddenly I was wide awake again.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You see, she died …’
‘I already know. Max said as much. I’m very, very sorry for your loss. When I knew her, Nina was a very special person. She had a gentle, luminous spirit, but underneath she was very strong. Of all the people in the order, she was my favourite.’
I blinked at this, tears rising within me to hear her so praised. I thought the same, too. ‘I … thank you.’
‘This must be hard.’
I bit my lip and tried to master myself. ‘It’s been very difficult, because of the way she died, and my dad …’
‘Yes, I was surprised to hear she’d married.’ I didn’t have the heart to correct her. ‘You know, after the order collapsed, I didn’t want contact with any of them.’ There was a pause. ‘It was … a very dark period in my life.’
‘I …’ I sat upright on Brigit’s little bed, trying to take this in.
I was speaking to Tess.
‘I – well, I met Penelope Longman and she said Mum had invented the whole thing … and I mean, for a minute there …’
‘I’m sure she did say that.’ There was a rueful amusement in her tone. ‘Ah, Penelope. She hasn’t changed.’
‘So it did all happen?’ I asked with rising excitement. ‘At Morningstar? The way my mum described it?’
‘I haven’t read these notebooks everyone’s talking about,’ said Tess, ‘but, yes. The things Max told me she’d written were all broadly true.’
I felt a huge, flooding relief and gratitude towards Tess. My mum wasn’t a crazy person, or a liar.
‘I’m just … I’m so grateful you called. I – I have some questions …’ I had a billion questions, in fact, but now I had the chance, most of them were too insanely personal to ask – How did sharing Aaron with my mum and the others work? How did you feel about being whored out to a drug dealer? And who murdered Peter, do you think?
I had no idea where to even begin.
‘I mean, I knew nothing about this,’ I said. ‘My dad knew nothing about this. In the notebooks my mum says she met Aaron and Lucy at some gathering, and then within a week she’s sleeping with him and has abandoned her university course to live at Morningstar.’ I could hear my voice ratcheting upwards, a slightly hysterical note to it.
‘Yes,’ said Tess with an unruffled calm. ‘That sounds about right.’
‘OK.’ I rubbed my temple. ‘I guess I just don’t understand why. Or even how …’
‘Ah. Well. The why and the how.’ There was a crisp sympathy there. ‘The how is that Lucy was dispatched to Cambridge to find potential new members. At the time I joined, we were all based in a big house in Chiddingfold, down in Surrey, which Aaron had bought with his royalties – it was nice enough, but nothing like Morningstar. Most Ascendants didn’t live in, but shared houses and flats nearby. There were about thirty of us. Some Aaron had met in the band or at festivals, like me, and some just gravitated to him through word of mouth. It was this chaotic, hand-to-mouth existence between royalty cheques supplemented by leaning on working members for donations.’ She sighed. ‘But I do believe it was an authentic thing, at least then. We were a community.’
‘So, what happened?’
‘Tristan happened,’ said Tess, with a hint of sadness. ‘He was the why, bless his daft heart. He was in this very, very vulnerable place and he walked right into Lucy’s arms, then Aaron’s. He fell and he fell hard. He gave them everything, including Morningstar.
‘I think Aaron, who has a certain innate snobbery, realized that we could do with attracting more Tristans. Getting rid of the more peripheral members, the ones that didn’t contribute – anything other than their love and time anyway – and replacing them, or at least exploiting them at arm’s length. That was Lucy’s remit. Find better people. Richer people.’
I snorted out a laugh. ‘My mum wasn’t rich.’
‘No?’ asked Tess mildly. ‘She looked good on paper, from what I heard. They sounded her out and checked out her background after the first meeting. Her father owned a very successful double-glazing business, and Nina was an only child.’
‘I … Sorry, they checked out my mum’s background?’ A chill of horror and pity went through me. ‘I had no idea it was all that … organized.’
‘Oh yes. They had a list of requirements. No point investing all that time and energy in her if she didn’t meet the criteria.’
‘The criteria?’
‘Yes. She was potentially rich. She had a submissive, biddable personality – that was important after the disaster with Sarah Lowe, who’d got the police involved when she walked out, claiming she’d been held against her will.’
‘Had she?’ I asked, horrified.
‘Oh, absolutely yes, by the end,’ said Tess, as though the matter wasn’t worthy of further consideration, ‘and while the police wouldn’t pursue the charges – they thought it was a domestic matter; it was a different age then – Aaron wasn’t interested in making the same m
istake again. He isn’t fond of the wrong sort of attention, despite having an inexhaustible thirst for the other kind.’
I didn’t know what to say to this. The cold-bloodedness of it chilled me.
My poor mum. She’d been invited to this party to meet a rock star – her life about to begin – and already she was being sized up as prey. Including background checks.
A thousand tiny details from the notebooks flooded in. Lucy twirling Mum before Wolf and Tristan, as though she was an acquisition. The way they’d assumed she’d be staying – knew she’d be staying.
‘And, of course, Nina was beautiful, so Aaron would enjoy sleeping with her. That was important, too.’ Tess sighed. ‘Sorry. I appreciate this is probably hard to hear.’
It was very hard to hear.
‘But I still don’t understand,’ I said, because I didn’t. ‘Even with his charm, his fame and his beautiful house, why would you? Why would any of you? There must have been something about this guy. I mean, what was he like? Aaron?’
She paused, lost in thought. In the background, I could hear the wail of a police siren coming from faraway.
‘It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer,’ Tess said. ‘I suppose what he was … he was very good at creating the space that you populated with your dream of him – with what you needed from him.
‘For instance, I needed him to love me, and also, because I was quite young, to parent me. To take control. My own parents were – are – lovely people, looking back, but they had enormous problems which I was incapable of appreciating at the time. And suddenly there was this older man, completely charming, utterly focused and willing to set boundaries for me.’ She sipped something. ‘It took a while for that perception to change. And of course, once you’re on his bad side …’
She let it hang there.
‘His “bad side”? What do you mean? Has he ever threatened you? Or tried to intimidate you into staying silent?’
‘What, threaten me?’ Tess laughed; a hollow, cracked sound. I found it impossible to marry up this sinister, cynical noise with the childlike, sunny Tess from the notebooks. ‘Oh, no. Aaron isn’t remotely interested in me. For the same reason he probably wouldn’t be interested in your mother, ultimately – especially once her parents dropped her. For someone who banged on incessantly about the illusory nature of material possessions, he was surprisingly venal. He would consider us both failures.’ She snorted. ‘We couldn’t even be blackmailed because we had nothing to lose.’
Everything Is Lies Page 22