“There you are,” Frank said. “Now it’s obvious.”
“No it’s not. I don’t see what difference it makes.”
“Here’s the thing about relics,” Frank told her. “They’re just bits of something much bigger. What you have to do is fill in the gaps.”
“Well, go on, then,” Daisy said. “Fill in the gaps!”
Frank folded her arms. “Since I’ve done all the hard work, I’ve decided to leave that bit to you.”
“You haven’t done anything,” Daisy grumbled. She stared at the relics on the bed. “Okay. Fill in the gaps . . . First there’s the letter he wrote.”
Gritting had come to Brightwood Hall every summer. After the tragedy with the Everlasting, however, he hadn’t been allowed to visit anymore. So he had tried asking Daisy’s mum, even though she was just a child at the time. Daisy thought it was likely that the letter she’d found wasn’t the only one he’d sent. But according to the kangaroo card he’d written some years later, Daisy’s mum had ignored all his letters.
Daisy picked up the card and looked at it again.
I hope you have a good life. I certainly will!
“He was angry,” Daisy told Frank.
Gritting felt he belonged in Brightwood. He felt he had a right to the place. Hadn’t he suggested to Daisy’s mum that they turn it into a hotel together? But she’d refused, and so Gritting had left for Australia and gone into partnership with somebody else.
Daisy turned to the newspaper clipping and reread it carefully. It was dated just a year ago. A man who owned hotels in a place called Brisbane had been found dead in a ravine. Daisy didn’t know what that had to do with Gritting or her mother.
“Do you know where Brisbane is?” she asked Frank.
“Of course I do!” Frank flicked an invisible bug off her shirt and looked away.
“Where is it, then?”
“Do I have to tell you everything?”
“You don’t know, do you?” Daisy said. “I thought explorers were meant to know things like that.”
“I do know,” Frank insisted. “But I’m certainly not going to tell you now.”
“Never mind,” Daisy said. “There’s an atlas in my bookcase.” She looked it up. “It’s in Australia.”
“Everyone knows that,” Frank said.
“Gritting went to Australia!” Daisy said. “What if the man who died in the ravine was his partner? And what if Gritting had something to do with his death?”
Daisy looked at the handwritten words.
Accidents happen!
There was something extremely unpleasant about that exclamation point.
“What if he sent the clipping to Mum as a kind of warning, to show her that it wasn’t really an accident at all?”
“That’s a lot of ‘what-ifs,’ ” Frank said, clearly still offended by the Brisbane conversation.
“I know,” Daisy said. “But look at the next relic, the watch. Gritting stole this from Brightwood Hall when he was a kid. Maybe smashing it was a message. Australia hadn’t worked out for him, so he came back and started threatening Mum again.”
“I suppose it makes sense,” Frank said. “Did your mum seem worried recently?”
“I don’t know,” Daisy said, trying to remember. “I didn’t notice.”
“Was she acting differently?”
“Well, she went to the bulk-buy store on Monday,” Daisy said. “She never goes on a Monday. She always goes on Wednesday.”
It was a small detail, although the more Daisy thought about it, the more inexplicable it seemed. Her mum had routines for everything and never varied them without a good reason.
“Don’t go anywhere,” Daisy told Frank. “I’ll be right back.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Daisy went to her mum’s bedroom. The last time she had been in here, she had been too busy examining the paintings to pay attention to anything else. Now she took a good long look around.
Among the combs and brushes on her mum’s dressing table she saw a Day Box. It was dated the day before her mum had disappeared. But her mum hadn’t finished making it. There was only one object inside.
Another envelope. Daisy instantly recognized the handwriting.
She reached into the envelope and felt paper and something soft.
It was the little plush kitten that hung from the rear-view mirror of her mum’s car. The one that she had treasured but gave to her mum because it was the best thing she had. It was wrapped in a narrow strip of paper that had words written on it in big letters: Accidents happen!
Someone had pulled the kitten’s head half off.
For a second or two, Daisy stared at the stuffing coming out of its neck, utterly bewildered. She didn’t understand what the kitten was doing there. She hadn’t noticed it was gone the last time she’d seen the car. But why would she notice something like that? She hadn’t been specially looking for it.
Gritting must have taken it. Daisy didn’t know when. Perhaps when her mum was out on a recent shopping trip. Were cars easy to break into? Did her mum ever leave hers unlocked? How long had he been following her before he saw his chance? There were too many questions, and Daisy didn’t have answers for any of them. Her hands shook as she lifted the piece of paper up to the light.
He had pressed so violently on the dot of the i that the pen had gone clear through the paper. It was only a detail, although for some reason it frightened her more than anything else.
Accidents happen!
Gritting had stolen the kitten, and then sent it back damaged as another warning, the worst yet. And the very next day, her mum had disappeared. Gritting must have known she had gone, arriving at Brightwood Hall with a tool to break the padlock on the gates, expecting the place to be empty.
Had he hurt her mum?
Daisy dropped the kitten and backed away, her stomach tight, her legs heavy with dread. She stumbled out of the room and into the Portrait Gallery. Gritting had talked about her mum in the past tense, the way you did when someone was dead. But she couldn’t be dead. It wasn’t possible.
On the far side of the Portrait Gallery, the General’s medals glittered on his chest. Daisy turned away automatically. Then she stopped. Perhaps the shock of finding the kitten had cleared her mind. Or maybe it was simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time. But at that moment, Daisy knew why she had always been frightened of the General and why that fear had grown in the past few days, doubling each time she crossed the Portrait Gallery and caught a glimpse of him from the corner of her eye.
If she looked at the General, looked at him properly, she was afraid she would see some aspect of her mum in his cold, mad face. Something familiar in his features, or the way he held his head. A sign, a mark, a shadow. And then Daisy would know that her mum was crazy too, just as the General had been.
It was a secret fear, so secret that even Daisy herself hadn’t been fully aware of it until this moment. Yet now that she was aware, she knew it was completely wrong. Perhaps her mum behaved in ways that people would call crazy. Daisy still didn’t know for sure whether that was true. But if it was true, it was only sadness that had caused it. Daisy thought of the walls of groceries and the paintings, and Dolly Caroline lying in her little box. It was the sadness of losing nearly everything and everyone you loved.
Her mum wasn’t like the General. She didn’t have The Crazy. You couldn’t catch The Crazy from anyone or get it just by being sad. You had to be born with it.
Daisy walked up to the picture of the General and stared directly at his face. The tips of his long waxed mustache were as sharp as bayonets, and his jacket was the color of fresh blood. But it was his eyes that held her attention.
Daisy knew those eyes. She had seen them just that morning. The same washed-out blue color, the same pupils shrunk to pinholes.
The Crazy ran through the Fitzjohn family. As it ran, it skipped whole generations and then it showed up again.
It wasn’t her
mum. It was Gritting who had The Crazy. It made you do terrible things. Like sending a thousand men to certain death. Or trying to kill a woman and her daughter just because you wanted what they had.
Daisy knew there was no use talking to Gritting. Or hiding from him, or even trying to fight him. The only thing she could do was run.
TWENTY-NINE
There was no time to pack a bag. Daisy went straight to the window in her bedroom. She slid down the rope by the side of the house, pulling great strands of ivy away from the wall in her haste.
At the bottom, she paused for a moment, her mind racing through her options. Behind her lay the Wilderness. If she took that route, it would take her a long time to make her way through the dense undergrowth. Another possibility was to climb the perimeter wall on either side of the grounds. But then she would be far from the road, and if Gritting saw her, he might catch her on the other side. Her best option was to make for the main gates. Someone in a passing car might see her, and even if there were no cars, she could follow the road to wherever it led.
Except she didn’t know where it led. For a split second, Daisy’s fear of the outside world was almost as great as her fear of Gritting himself. She shook her head. The road led to people, she told herself. It led to help.
She ran across the front of the house, keeping to the cover of bushes wherever she could. When she got to the topiary, she made a dash for the area of trees just beyond and crouched down, panting, her eyes on the long sweep of meadow that lay between her and the gates.
It was empty. The air was still, and she could hear the murmur of insects. Far off, a blackbird called its familiar, reassuring song.
Daisy took a deep breath and plunged into the meadow, running bent double through the long grasses, gnats rising in clouds above her head.
It was a long way to the gates. She reached a cedar tree and rested for a moment or two in its green shadow, her heart pounding. The gates were a hundred yards away. She could cover the distance in a little more than thirty seconds if she sprinted.
Daisy took off in a headlong dash towards the Lookout Tree. She had climbed it a hundred times and knew its many perches as well as she knew the great staircase of Brightwood Hall itself. From its long, overhanging branches, she could look over the perimeter wall, and if Gritting was nowhere to be seen, she could drop down to the grassy edge of the road.
She reached the tree and started pulling herself up, her toes finding cracks in the bark, her arms reaching for familiar handholds. She was crawling on her belly along one of the lower branches, when a noise made her look down.
Gritting was standing just below, staring straight up at her.
The shock sent Daisy slipping sideways, her hands grasping at empty air. She fell at his feet, all the breath knocked out of her, and he grabbed her before she had a chance to move.
“Making a run for it?” He lifted her up by her arm as if she weighed no more than a bundle of rags.
Daisy was too busy struggling to reply. But it was no use.
“Where’s my mum?” she cried. “What have you done to her?”
“We’re not going to talk about that,” Gritting said. “I was going to wait until it got dark and then surprise you. But I underestimated you from the start. You’re far more sneaky than I thought.”
“You’re the sneaky one!” Daisy shouted. “You’re a sneak and a liar!”
“I think you and I need to take a little walk,” Gritting said, ignoring her outburst. “Turn around, that’s right.”
He took hold of the collar of her shirt, and they went up the driveway towards the house. Whenever she slowed or hesitated, he gave her a little shove.
“I’m glad you’re not trying to run,” Gritting said. “It would be a pity if I had to hurt you. It would be hard to make it look like an accident.”
Daisy remembered her knife, still stuck in the waistband of her trousers. Gritting hadn’t seen it because her shirt covered it.
“I don’t understand,” she said, trying to distract him.
“I like accidents,” Gritting said. “It was the yacht blowing up that first sparked my interest.”
“The Everlasting?”
“That’s the one. I didn’t have anything to do with the accident, although you could say it inspired me. Afterwards, I realized that once the old lady, your great-grandmother, died, your mother and I would be the only members of the Fitzjohn family left. We’d be the last heirs to Brightwood. My own mother didn’t count. She was never in the best of health. That was why I was sent here every summer.”
How casually he talked about people dying.
“I saw how convenient accidents could be,” Gritting continued. “Ever since then, they’ve been a specialty of mine.”
They were at the front of the house now. From the corner of her eye, Daisy could see the topiary with True’s body lying at its center. Sweat ran down her neck and trickled under her arms. Gritting gave her another shove. She turned down the path towards the walled gardens.
“Please just tell me what’s happened to my mum,” Daisy begged.
“Let’s just say she’s not acting crazy anymore,” Gritting said.
You’re the one with The Crazy! Daisy thought.
“It didn’t have to come to this,” Gritting said. “I was polite. I was reasonable. I sent your mother letter after letter, telling her she had to share this place with me. That’s all I asked for! To share it, to make it into something. There’s room for a hotel and a golf course. Cut down the trees and drain the lake, and you’ve got land for twenty or more luxury homes.”
Daisy remembered how he had spent a whole day measuring everything with his little wheel and stick.
“Your mother wouldn’t see sense,” Gritting said. “Eventually I gave up and went abroad.”
“To Australia,” Daisy said. “I found the card you sent.”
“You have been a good little detective!” Gritting said, shoving her again.
“That partner of yours. It wasn’t an accident, was it?”
“He was about to accuse me of stealing money from our company,” Gritting said. “He fell down a cliff instead.”
“Don’t you have feelings?” Daisy burst out. “Don’t you care about anything?”
He didn’t reply. They had passed the glasshouse, and now they stood on the edge of the Wilderness. The path that led through the trees was dark and narrow. Daisy looked quickly from left to right.
“Don’t get any ideas,” Gritting said. His grip tightened on her collar. “Remember, I know this place almost as well as you do.”
The branches of the trees were laced together, forming a tunnel over the path. Brambles tore at Daisy’s trousers. The path wound into a nettle bush and then disappeared. Gritting pushed her onwards, through the stinging leaves.
In the distance, Daisy heard the sound of the old stable chain, clanking steadily as if to summon her. She shrank back.
“I don’t like it here,” she said. “I don’t want to go.”
But they were already at the stables. Ramshackle buildings surrounded a yard. Doors hung from their frames and vines tugged at the walls. Through the empty windows, Daisy glimpsed the dark shapes of long-forgotten things, made strange by rot and creeping weeds.
Gritting nudged her to the center of the yard. He kicked at a wooden board that lay on the ground, shifting it sideways to reveal the black mouth of a well. Daisy drew back in surprise and fear. She never went to the stables and hadn’t known there was a well there.
“They used it to water the horses in the old days,” Gritting said. “I used to come here when I was a kid, before they covered it up. It was one of my favorite spots.”
He paused. “You asked me whether I cared about anything. The only thing I care about is Brightwood Hall. It’s the only place I’ve ever belonged. The Fitzjohns couldn’t see it, of course. They made a great pretense of being kind, but they never liked me. I didn’t fit in with their stupid parties and gardening and tenn
is. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. It still doesn’t matter. Do you know why?”
Daisy shook her head. Somewhere deep in the other side of the Wilderness, a peacock gave a shrill scream.
“Because accidents happen,” Gritting said, and pushed her into the well.
THIRTY
Daisy fell, too shocked to scream, her body scraping against the wall of the well. She landed on a thick layer of leaves, the smell of mold and damp stone thick in her nostrils.
She was stunned. It was almost completely dark, but when she turned her head, she could see a blue circle of sky about fifteen feet above. The outline of Gritting’s head and shoulders appeared at the edge of the circle; he was looking down. But Daisy was in shadow and he couldn’t see her. After a long moment, he disappeared.
Daisy shifted and felt a searing pain down her right leg. She struggled to her knees, feeling her way in the darkness. The well was narrow; she could easily touch both sides when she stretched out her arms. But as she did so, the leaves shifted beneath her, and she heard the sound of cracking wood from somewhere deep below.
She stopped short. She hadn’t landed at the bottom of the well. Instead she’d fallen onto a layer of leaves and branches that blocked it partway down. The cracking wood must have been the sound of those branches starting to give way under her weight.
Daisy groped along the wall, frantically searching for handholds. The stone was perfectly smooth. Her leg burned and she shifted, trying to get comfortable. The crack of wood came again, louder and more ominous.
There was nothing she could do but stay as still as possible.
Her breath came fast, faster even than her heartbeat, the air squeezed to a whimper as it reached her throat. No solitary traveler in the desert or astronaut drifting in endless space had ever felt more helpless or alone. She closed her eyes and clenched her fists, willing Frank to appear. Even a girl who wasn’t there would be better than nobody at all.
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