‘Sophia,’ he said, with the commanding tones of someone who was rarely contradicted. ‘You have to calm down. We have to talk, seriously, about the future.’ He stood up and walked towards me.
A horror came over me then, that he might touch me.
I would not stay here a moment longer.
I bolted out of the chair and dived past him to the door. It took a second to work the medieval latch with its scraping metal device, and he was nearly at my shoulder before it flew open and I was in the long gallery, running for the stairs.
‘STOP HER!’ he bellowed, emerging into the long gallery behind me. The house seemed to come alive. Doors opened, and below there seemed to be hundreds of them somehow, congregating in the hallways, whispering to one another through the cracks in barely open doors, though there could have been no more than twenty people in the house.
As I tore down the stairs, the blonde woman, Emily, stood, her arms outstretched as though to catch me. I swerved around her as she swore, pelted for the front door and shoved it open.
I ran across the drawbridge, the wooden timbers bouncing beneath my pounding feet, and threw myself in the car, slamming the door after me.
‘Drive!’ I shouted at the driver, but he didn’t.
I was not his master.
Aaron was, and he crossed the drawbridge a minute later, taking care not to run. At the vast oak door, a plethora of pale faces peeked out at me. They were old, young – there were even some children.
One, with a pixyish haircut and sharp chin, I thought I recognized.
Aaron leaned over me, speaking to me through the window.
‘Sophia, you need to calm down and come back inside.’
‘No! Absolutely not! You let me out of here NOW.’
‘There’s so much to tell you, so much you don’t understand.’
‘If you don’t let me out of here!’ I screamed in my hysteria. ‘I’ll call the police, do you hear me?’ I waved my phone at him.
I had had enough revelations for one day. I needed to go home, lick my wounds and think.
The threat of the law was at last enough for him, though.
‘When you calm down and are capable of rationality,’ he said, ‘we’ll talk again. You need to process this. I get it.’ He stood back and smiled. ‘We’ll speak again soon enough.’
He smacked on the roof, and the driver pulled away while I wept.
I had no idea where he was going to take me. Through my tears I could see that we were following the same route back to Lullingstone that we had taken.
A few times I caught his eyes in the rear-view mirror, studying me. Just his eyes, though his jaw was obviously tense, the muscles in his shaven neck working.
He pulled into the car park, next to my KA. I wondered, distantly, how out of all these cars he knew which one was mine.
He got out to open the door and held it.
‘Will you be all right?’ he asked. ‘Should I get someone? Do you want to go back?’
It was the first time I had seen him properly. He looked very young, and alarmed, as though even this little bit of interaction with me was forbidden.
‘You don’t have to worry about me,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m fine.’
‘I do have to worry,’ he said.
I felt a twinge of gratitude then, that at least someone around here was a compassionate human being.
Then he said, ‘You’re the Sacred Lady. The World Soul.’
I got out of the car without another word or a backward glance.
Chapter Thirty
‘How did it go?’ asked Rowan.
I was back in my car.
I’d been sitting there for two hours, perhaps a little less. The Mercedes had rolled away, leaving me alone and desolate. Everything seemed slightly unreal.
There was no sign of Max. I wondered, distantly, how he’d got back to London. More than anything, I was horribly relieved he hadn’t been there with me.
What are you talking about? Max knows Aaron Kessler is your father.
The thought came to me instantly. He’d known, of course he’d known. The way he’d said, during that first phone call, when I’d told him my mother was dead, ‘This is Sophia I’m talking to?’
He knew. My mum must have told him.
‘Y’know, Rowan, I … I don’t really …’
‘Soph?’
‘I …’
And then I burst into tears again.
‘Soph? Sophia! Did they hurt you?’
‘Not physically.’
‘I’m coming to get you.’
‘No,’ I said, pulling myself together. ‘Absolutely not. I wasn’t hurt, I’m fine. It was just … well, I found out some things. Does Dad know where I went today?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Good. Rowan, you have to promise me never to tell him.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s just … they said things about Mum. Things he doesn’t need to know, all right?’
He was quiet. ‘All right. Listen, about your dad.’
‘Is there something the matter?’
There was a long pause. ‘He’s not himself. I’m worried about him.’ He breathed out. ‘He’s saying some very strange things. He’s very upset, you know, about your mum.’
‘I know, Ro, I know.’ I stared out of the window, at the trees. The storm hadn’t broken yet, but it would soon, and the air was hot and still. ‘I know. He’s really angry at her.’
And if he ever learned what I’d just learned … Oh my God, how could he know Aaron was my father? He hadn’t even known my mum was in the order!
He must never, ever find out.
‘I’m on my way back. I’ll see you then.’
‘OK, Soph. Drive safely.’
He was gone.
I lingered for a long moment, gazing at my phone. The third notebook was once again under my fingers, that blank request for a password. I must have typed in dozens and dozens of them since finding the document last night. My cut palms hurt with the effort.
Aaron had called me the World Soul.
You know, now I thought about it, so had the driver.
On a whim I tapped in ‘worldsoul’.
Then ‘WorldSoul’.
Then ‘TheWorldSoul’.
And at that, it sprang open.
THE THIRD NOTEBOOK
* * *
Chapter Thirty-One
I don’t remember much about that morning after the ritual, Sophia, except that I felt unbearably nauseous and bruised all over, and there was a bitter, chemical taste in my mouth. They’d come to me as I lay on the grass near the Yew Maze, the sun rising over its untidy tops. I had a sense of Lucy and Tristan, jackets thrown over their robes and their feet thrust into wellington boots, urging me to ‘get up, get up, you have to get up now’, and exhausted as I was, in the end I responded to the naked fear in their voices and let them guide me back to the house.
The feeling had come back to my feet, and my toes sang with pain. I was shivering, but mostly I wanted to sleep.
‘Where’s Aaron?’ I asked. The dawn was rosy pink, the sky tinted like blood in bathwater.
‘Upstairs,’ said Tristan, trying to sound upbeat, but there was a cracked note in his voice.
‘I had a bad dream. Tess was screaming about someone being killed. Did something bad happen?’
‘It’s all right, Nina, don’t be scared – it’s going to be fine,’ said Tristan. ‘But we do need to go back to the house now.’ He was walking quickly, they both were, and it was hurting my feet. I wanted them to slow down. I reached out to grab Tristan’s coat, roughly thrown over his robe, and as my hand closed around the cloth I could see it was covered in something, dark red scales of dried blood that fell off my skin as it moved.
I gasped then and stood stock-still.
Lucy gently but firmly pushed me forward.
‘You need to have a bath. We all need to clean up, Nina.’ She pushed me forward. ‘Before the poli
ce arrive.’
* * *
There was the shower, and I realized with a little shock that Lucy was in the shower with me, still wearing her bra and knickers, which was strange, but no stranger than anything else that had happened in the last few hours. Our robes lay in a discarded pile on the bathroom floor, before Tristan gathered them up in his arms and bore them away.
Lucy’s hands on my head were hard and rough as she washed my hair and scrubbed my fingernails. ‘Stand up, Nina,’ she commanded, when I decided I was tired and would like a little sit-down before the shower went any further.
Whatever was in the Sacred Draught was intense, and it was coming in and out like waves at sea. Sometimes I was awake, realizing I was covered in blood and that I could remember nothing of the ritual. Then, within a few minutes, I was melting under the buffeting water, and it seemed to me that Lucy was singing as her hands moved through my hair and that we were mermaids now. I kept asking her what the song was.
‘For fuck’s sake, Nina, for the thousandth time, I’m not singing. Stop being silly and try to concentrate. We’re in trouble.’
I must have been driving her mad. I’d had a larger dose. Its bitter, sickly taste was the very last thing I consciously remembered. We’d been standing in the dining room with the others, and Aaron had offered me the cup half full of purplish liquid, wine adulterated with God knows what, and I had drained it all on his orders, after the others had taken only a few swallows.
Lucy, of course, was sober now.
‘Is Aaron OK?’ I asked. I’m ashamed to admit that this was all I cared about.
‘Aaron’s fine, sweetheart.’
‘What about the others?’
‘Everything’s fine,’ she said, but her voice was tight. ‘We’re going to sort it out.’
Then she was roughly towelling me, attacking my hair with a comb and hairdryer, and I was aware of Tristan rubbing hard at the bath with cloths and something that smelled like bleach.
This struck me as rather fastidious. I’d never seen Tristan clean anything in his life.
‘Is there nothing we can give her, you know, to bring her down? Should we give her some black coffee, or something?’ he asked.
‘No. She needs to sleep it off.’
I was led up the stairs, which seemed to go on for ever. The fire in the long gallery was cold ash. We passed the open door to the dining room.
All traces of the ritual were gone, the candles vanished. The space looked oddly vacant, even with the instruments stacked in their usual places.
Then I noticed, almost in passing, what it was. The recording equipment had disappeared.
‘Where’s Aaron?’ I asked again, drowsily. Suddenly I’d never been so tired.
‘Upstairs. But he’s asleep. Everyone’s asleep. Come on.’
‘You said the police are coming.’
‘Yes. There was an accident,’ said Lucy. ‘But it’s going to be fine. We’re going to take care of everything. We just have to stick together, all right?’
This filled me with such nameless dread I could do nothing but nod. I had a quick flashback of tugging at Tristan’s coat and seeing blood on my hands.
Had I dreamed that? The blood? I couldn’t trust my senses or memories.
‘I want to sleep, too.’
‘Yes,’ said Lucy. ‘And you will, sweetheart.’
‘Did something happen to Aaron?’ I asked again, voicing my darkest fear. ‘You’d tell me, wouldn’t you?’
‘Of course, sweetheart.’ Lucy’s eyes were tearing up. ‘Aaron’s fine. But Peter … Peter had an accident.’
I did not need to ask any more. I already knew, in my heart of hearts, what the rest would be.
I glanced down at my scrubbed hand, now pink, the secret gaps beneath my fingernails sore and sensitive.
Nothing would ever be the same.
* * *
‘So, Miss Mackenzie, you know that we just need to take a statement.’ A pause. ‘Are you all right with that?’
I was in the morning room with a big man in a grey coat who sported a dark blue tie, with what looked like a darts’ league insignia on it. He had a tiny moustache, almost but not quite like Hitler’s, pouchy eyes and curly hair, his pink scalp gleaming through in places.
His name, he had told me, was Detective Inspector Derek Holmes and he was writing things down on a big pad.
Next to him was a smaller, thinner man in another cheap suit. He’d been introduced, but I didn’t remember his name. He didn’t speak, he just stared.
It filled me with horror.
I had never really spoken to the police before, other than to ask directions. Now I was about to lie to them.
Penelope’s disdain for me had utterly vanished as she’d talked me through the story she’d devised and the role I was to play; her lips had been as white as her skin.
We had to get this right, she’d said. Every detail had to match up. We were all in this together now. Do you understand, Nina?
Well, I assumed we were in it together. I still hadn’t seen Aaron – not since the ritual. He hadn’t been present for Penelope’s briefing.
I nodded stiffly at Detective Inspector Derek Holmes and sniffed. My hands were in my lap, one of them crushing a paper tissue already damp with tears.
They’d both appeared just as Peter’s body had been carried out of the house by the ambulancemen. Good cop, bad cop.
‘What were you doing last night?’ asked the detective.
‘Nothing much,’ I said in a faint, sad voice, just as Penelope had coached me. ‘We had dinner and some drinks afterwards.’
‘So, as much as you can remember, Nina – can I call you Nina? – what do you remember happening?’
‘We cooked a meal.’ I scrunched the tissue to my face. It came away wet. These tears were a source of amazement to me – was I crying out of fear? For Peter?
For myself?
‘And who was present at this meal?’
‘Aaron, Penelope, Lucy, Tristan, Peter, Wolf and me.’ I thought hard for a minute. ‘And Tess.’
‘So Peter was at the table? When did he arrive?’
‘About half four, five o’clock I think. I don’t remember exactly. We had started cooking.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘We all sat down to dinner. Aaron gave a toast, I think.’ I spontaneously added this little fictional detail. There hadn’t been a meal, of course. But as Penelope had pointed out, there was no way we could tell the police what we’d really been up to. We had to appear to be normal, unremarkable people, and as far as the police were concerned, normal, unremarkable people cooked meals and gave toasts. They didn’t don robes and engage in secret rituals. Aaron had made his wishes very clear to Lucy and Penelope, I was told. We had to persuade the police that what had happened to Peter was a terrible accident, and as normal, unremarkable people, we were naturally distraught about it.
‘And then?’ he asked.
‘We all went upstairs.’
‘Upstairs. Where to?’
‘The dining room – but we don’t use it for that. The instruments are set up in there. Aaron and the lads played them.’
‘And you had more to drink?’ He licked his lips.
‘Yeah.’
‘And what time did you go up there, do you think?’
‘I … I don’t know. About quarter past eight, maybe?’
‘And you all went up together and carried on drinking.’
‘Yeah, we were all there.’ I let out a little sob. ‘Having a good time.’
None of this had happened, of course, but you would be hard pressed, based on the evidence, to work this out. Penelope’s cleverness had been extraordinary this morning. She had filled and drained glasses with spirits and wine, asked us to press our lips to them, and then placed them around the dining room, to create the illusion of an abandoned party. Perhaps she knew to do these things from the sketchy legal training she’d been pursuing before she threw it all in to fol
low Aaron. Or, I thought with a hint of distaste, perhaps it was just her terrifying native cunning shining through.
I sobbed again, not so much grief-stricken as overwhelmed and terrified at my daring.
‘Take it easy, love. Did you have anything other than drink at this party?’
‘Like what?’ I asked, though I knew exactly what he meant.
‘Any drugs?’
This was the first time the other man had spoken. He had a deep voice that somehow didn’t seem to go with the rest of him. I blinked at him in alarm.
‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘No, I didn’t …’ I tailed off.
‘How much had you had to drink, then?’ asked Derek Holmes.
‘I’m not sure. Three, maybe four glasses of wine? And some brandy?’
‘About what time did you go to bed?’
‘Early. I felt a little sick. About half ten, twenty to eleven. I honestly can’t remember. It was early. For us. The others stayed up.’
‘And …’
‘And I fell straight to sleep,’ I said. The tissue was little more than wet shreds in my palm.
‘You didn’t hear anything after that?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I lied. ‘I never heard a thing until the shot. I was in bed. I ran down the stairs … I shouted for the others, but nobody answered. They’d gone out. There’s no phone here so I didn’t know who to call. There was blood everywhere in the hall. All over my feet. And his head …’
I burst into tears again, and I could almost feel the unspoken communication over my head between the two men.
What it meant and how this had gone, I had no idea, but when the detective carefully helped me to my feet, his hand lingering just a little too long on my back, I had a feeling I knew.
* * *
This is the story we had come up with between us:
The others told the police that I had felt sick and gone to bed early, and that they had all put on thick coats and boots, taken two torches and gone out to watch the stars together. It had been a beautiful clear night, with a full moon.
After a little while Peter had complained of being cold – he’d brought only a thin jacket. He’d seen a deer in the trees near the grounds and he kept saying he’d like to shoot it. Peter was very fond of shooting, if not very good at it. Aaron had several licensed guns. Aaron had a lot of expensive toys lying around the house.
Everything Is Lies Page 29