The Visitors Book

by Sophie Hannah

  “You might have a point,” I concede. “I’ve been particularly looking forward to telling the hardworking, stressed people I meet that I do Nothing. The more relaxed a person looks, the less fun it’ll be to boast to them. And it’s pointless bragging to the likes of you—you love your overstuffed diary. So I’m just going to have to hope I meet lots of people who hate their demanding jobs but can’t escape them. Oh God.” I close my eyes. “It’s sickeningly obvious, isn’t it? It’s me I want to taunt. My former self. That’s who I’m angry with.”

  I could have escaped at any time. Could have walked away years earlier, instead of letting work swallow up my whole life.

  “I literally cannot believe I have a mother who . . . homilies on in the way you do, Mum,” Ellen grumbles. “None of my friends’ mothers do it. None. They all say normal things, like ‘No TV until you’ve done your homework’ and ‘Would you like some more lasagna?’”

  “Yes, well, your mother can’t go ten minutes without having a major, life-changing realization—can you, darling?”

  “Fuck off! Oops.” I giggle. If I’ve ever been happier than I am now, I can’t remember the occasion.

  “Aha! We’re on the move again.” Alex starts to sing, “End of the traffic, traffic, end of the traffic, traffic, end of the traffic, traffic jam, end of the traffic, traffic, end of the traffic, traffic jam, traffic jam, traffic jam . . .”

  Poor, long-dead Georges Bizet. I’m sure this wasn’t the legacy he had in mind.

  “Excuse me while I don’t celebrate,” says Ellen. “We’ve still got another, what, seven hours before we get there? I’m boiling. When are we going to get a car with air-conditioning that works?”

  “I don’t believe any car air-conditioning works,” I tell her. “It’s like windshield wipers. The other cars want you to think they’ve got it figured out, but they’re all hot and stuffy on days like today, whatever Jeremy Clarkson might want us to think. They all have wipers that squeak like bats being garroted.”

  “Aaand . . . we’re at a standstill again,” says Alex, shaking his head. “The golden age of being in transit was short-lived. You’re wrong about the seven hours, though, El. Quite, quite wrong.”

  “Yeah, it’s just doubled to fourteen,” Ellen says bitterly.

  “Wrong. Mum and I didn’t say anything because we wanted to surprise you, but actually . . . we’re very nearly there.”

  I smile at Ellen in the rearview mirror. She’s hiding behind her thick, dark brown hair, trying to hang on to her disgruntled mood and not succumb to laughter. Alex is a rotten practical joker. His ideas are imaginative enough, but he’s scuppered every time by his special prankster voice, instantly recognizable to anyone who has known him longer than a week.

  “Yeah right, Dad. We’re still on the North Circular and we’re very nearly in Devon. Of course.” Big, beautiful green eyes and heavy sarcasm: two things I adore about my daughter.

  “No, not Devon. There’s been a change of plan. We didn’t want to inconvenience you with a long drive, so . . . we’ve sold Speedwell House and bought that one instead!” Alex points out of the car window to a squat redbrick 1930s-or-thereabouts semi-detached house. I know immediately which one he means. It looks ridiculous. It’s the one anyone would single out, the last in a row of eight. There are three signs attached to its façade, all too big for such a small building.

  My skin feels hot and tingly all of a sudden. Like when I had cellulitis on my leg after getting bitten by a mosquito in Corfu, except this time it’s my whole body.

  I stare at the house with the signs. Silently, I instruct the traffic not to move so that I can examine it for as long as I need to.

  Why do I need to?

  Apart from the excessive ornamentation, there is nothing to distinguish this house from any other 1930s redbrick semi. One sign, the largest—in the top right-hand corner, above a bedroom window—says “Panama Row.” That must refer to all the houses huddled bravely together, facing six lanes of roaring traffic immediately outside their windows.

  The other two signs—one missing a screw and leaning down on one side and the other visibly grime-streaked—are the name and number of the house. I try to make myself look away, but I can’t. I read both and have opinions about them, positive and negative.

  That’s right: number 8. Yes, it’s called . . . No. No, that isn’t its name.

  Pressure is building in my eyes, head, chest. Thrumming.

  I wait until the worst of it subsides, then look down at my arms. They look ordinary. No goosebumps. Impossible. I can feel them: prickly lumps under my skin.

  “Our new house appears to be called ‘German,’” says Alex. “Ludicrous name! I mean, er, won’t it be fun to live in a house called ‘German,’ El?”

  “No, because we’re not going to be living there. As if Mum’d agree to buy a house on a nearly motorway!”

  “You know why she agreed? Because, in no more than ten minutes, we’ll take a left turn, then another left, and we’ll have arrived. No more long journey, just home sweet home. As the old Chinese proverb says, ‘He who buys a beautiful house in the countryside far away might never get there, and may as well buy an ugly house on the North Circular and have done with it.’”

  “It’s not ugly,” I manage to say, though my throat is so tight, I can hardly speak.

  It’s lovely. It’s safe. Stop the car.

  I’m not looking at number 8 Panama Row anymore. I tore my eyes away, and now I must make sure they stay away. That won’t be hard. I’m too scared to look again.

  “Mum? What’s wrong? You sound weird.”

  “You look weird,” says Alex. “Justine? Are you okay? You’re shivering.”

  “No,” I whisper. “I’m not.” Not okay. Yes, shivering. Too hot, but shivering. I want to clarify, but my tongue is paralyzed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I . . .”

  “Mum, you’re scaring me. What is it?”

  “It’s not called ‘German.’ Some of the letters have fallen off.” How do I know this? I’ve never seen 8 Panama Row before in my life. Never heard of it, known about it, been anywhere near it.

  “Oh yeah,” says Ellen. “She’s right, Dad. You can see where the other letters were.”

  “But I didn’t see it. I . . . I knew the name wasn’t German. It had nothing to do with what I saw.”

  “Justine, calm down. Nothing to do with what you saw? That makes no sense.”

  “It’s obvious there are letters missing,” says Ellen. “There’s loads of empty sign left at the end of the name. Who would call a house ‘German,’ anyway?”

  What should I do and say? I’d tell Alex the truth if we were alone.

  “Dad? Accelerate? Like, you’re holding everyone up. Ugh! I said ‘like’ again, goddammit.”

  “Don’t say ‘goddammit’ either,” Alex tells her.

  “Don’t let me watch The Good Wife, then. And you two swear all the time, hypocrites.”

  The car creeps forward, then picks up speed. I feel braver as soon as I know it’s no longer possible for me to see 8 Panama Row. “That was . . . strange,” I say. The strangest thing that has ever happened to me. I exhale slowly.

  “What, Mum?”

  “Yes, tell us, goddammit.”

  “Dad! Objection! Sustained.”

  “Overruled, actually. You can’t sustain your own objection. Anyway, shush, will you?”

  Shush. Shut up, shut up, shut up. It’s not funny. Nothing about this is funny.

  “Justine, what’s the matter with you?” Alex is more patient than I am. I’d be raising my voice by now.

  “That house. You pointed, and I looked, and I had this . . . this overwhelmingly strong feeling of yes. Yes, that’s my house. I wanted to fling open the car door and run to it.”

  “Except you don’t live there, so that’s mad. You don’t live anywhere at the moment. Until this morning you lived in London, and hopefully by this evening you’ll live just outside K
ingswear in Devon, but you currently live nowhere.”

  How appropriate. Do Nothing, live nowhere.

  “You certainly don’t live in an interwar semi beside the A406, so you can relax.” Alex’s tone is teasing but not unkind. I’m relieved that he doesn’t sound worried. He sounds less concerned now than he did before; the direction of travel reassures me.

  “I know I don’t live there. I can’t explain it. I had a powerful feeling that I belonged in that house. Or belonged to it, somehow. By ‘powerful,’ I mean like a physical assault.”

  “Lordy McSwordy,” Ellen mumbles from the back seat.

  “Almost a premonition that I’ll live there one day.” How can I phrase it to make it sound more rational? “I’m not saying it’s true. Now that the feeling’s passed, I can hear how daft it sounds, but when I first looked, when you pointed at it, there was no doubt in my mind.”

  “Justine, nothing in the world could ever induce you to live cheek by jowl with six lanes of traffic,” says Alex. “You haven’t changed that much. Is this a joke?”

  “No.”

  “I know what it is: poverty paranoia. You’re worried about you not earning, us taking on a bigger mortgage . . . Have you had nightmares about losing your teeth?”

  “My teeth?”

  “I read somewhere that teeth-loss dreams mean anxiety about money.”

  “It isn’t that.”

  “Even poor, you wouldn’t live in that house—not unless you were kidnapped and held prisoner there.”

  “Dad,” says Ellen. “Is it time for your daily You’re-Not-Helping reminder?”

  Alex ignores her. “Have you got something to drink?” he asks me. “You’re probably dehydrated. Heatstroke.”

  “Yes.” There’s water in my bag, by my feet.

  “Drink it, then.”

  I don’t want to. Not yet. As soon as I pull out the bottle and open it, this conversation will be over; Alex will change the subject to something less inexplicable. I can’t talk about anything else until I understand what’s just happened to me.

  “Oh no. Look: roadwork.” When Alex starts to sing again, I don’t know what’s happening at first, even though it’s the same tune from Carmen and only the words have changed. Ellen joins in. Soon they’re singing in unison, “Hard hats and yellow jackets, hard hats and yellow jackets, hard hats and yellow jackets, boo. Hard hats and yellow jackets, hard hats and yellow jackets, boo, sod it, boo, sod it, boo . . .”

  Or I could try to forget about it. With every second that passes, that seems more feasible. I feel almost as I did before Alex pointed at the house. I could maybe convince myself that I imagined the whole thing.

  Go on, then. Tell yourself that.

  The voice in my head is not quite ready. It’s still repeating words from the script I’ve instructed it to discard:

  One day, 8 Panama Row—a house you would not choose in a million years—will be your home, and you won’t mind the traffic at all. You’ll be so happy and grateful to live there, you won’t be able to believe your luck.

  FOUR MONTHS LATER

  Family Tree

  The Ingreys of Speedwell House

  Murder Mystery Story

  by Ellen Colley, Class 9G

  Chapter 1

  ~

  The Killing of Malachy Dodd

  Perrine Ingrey dropped Malachy Dodd out of a window. She wanted to kill him and she succeeded. Later, no one believed her when she screamed, “I didn’t do it!” Both of their families, the Ingreys and the Dodds, knew that Perrine and Malachy had been upstairs in a room together with no one else around.

  This was Perrine’s bedroom. It had a tiny wooden door (painted mint green, Perrine’s favorite color) next to her bed. This little door was the only way of getting from one part of the upstairs of Speedwell House to the other unless you wanted to go back downstairs, through the living room and the library, and then climb up a different lot of stairs, and no one ever wanted to do that. They preferred to bend themselves into a quarter of the size of the shortest dwarf in the world (because that was how tiny the mint-green door was) and squeeze themselves through the minuscule space.

  After she dropped Malachy out of the window and watched him fall to his gory death on the terrace below, Perrine squashed herself through the tiny green door and pulled it shut behind her. When her parents found her huddled on the landing on the other side, she exclaimed, “But I wasn’t even in the room when it happened!”

  Nobody was convinced. Perrine hadn’t been clever enough to move a decent distance away from the door, so it was obvious she had just come through it. Her second mistake was to yell, “He fell out by accident!” For one thing Malachy was not tall enough to fall out of the window accidentally (all the adults agreed later that his center of gravity was too low) and for another, if Perrine wasn’t in the room when it happened, how did she know that he fell by accident?

  A third big clue was that every single other person who might have murdered Malachy was downstairs in the dining room at the time of his hideous death. All of the Dodds were there, and all the Ingreys apart from Perrine. Her two older sisters, Lisette and Allisande, were sitting in chairs facing the three sets of French doors that were open onto the terrace where Malachy fell, splattering his red and gray blood and brains on the ground beside the fountain. It felt as if his falling shook the whole house, especially the French “purple crystals” chandelier above Lisette and Allisande’s heads, but that must have been an illusion.

  Lisette and Allisande definitely saw Malachy fall and smash, however, and, what’s more, they heard a loud, triumphant “Ha!” floating down from above. Both of them recognized the voice of their younger sister, Perrine.

  So, if all the other possible suspects were in the dining room, who else apart from Perrine Ingrey could have been responsible for Malachy landing in a heap on the paving slabs? I’ll tell you who: nobody.

  There was no doubt that Perrine killed him, however much she wailed that she was innocent. (The death of Malachy Dodd is not the murder mystery in this story. The mystery is who murdered Perrine Ingrey, because she went on to get murdered too, but that comes later.)

  No, there was nothing mysterious about the cruel killing of Malachy. Both of the families, the Ingreys and the Dodds, knew the truth, and soon everybody in Kingswear and the surrounding towns and villages knew it too. You cannot keep anything quiet in a place like Devon, where the main hobby is spreading cream and jam onto scones and gossiping about everything you’ve heard that day.

  It came as a surprise to absolutely nobody that one of the Ingreys had committed a murder, because they were such a weird family—the weirdest that Kingswear and its environs had ever known. But there was one big shock for everyone when they heard the news. People should have realized that the most bizarre family for miles around would do the opposite of what you'd expect, or else they would have no right to retain their title of weirdest family. And what most of the nearby town and village folk would have expected was that if 1) there was a murder and 2) the killer was one of the three Ingrey sisters, it was bound to be either Lisette, the eldest, or Allisande, the middle sister. Certainly not Perrine, the youngest, who was the only one who had had what you might call a properly balanced upbringing.

  You see, unlike most parents, especially so long ago, Bascom and Sorrel Ingrey couldn’t

  1

  Ellen?” I knock on her bedroom door, even though it’s ajar and I can see her sitting on her bed. When she doesn’t respond, I walk in. “What’s this?” I hold up the papers.

  She doesn’t look at me, but continues to stare out of the window. I can’t help looking too. I still haven’t gotten used to the beauty of where we live. Ellen’s room and the kitchen directly beneath it have the best views in the house: the fountain and gazebo to the left, and, straight ahead, the gentle downward curve of the grass bank that stretches all the way from our front door to the River Dart, studded with rhododendrons, magnolia trees, camellias. When we first ca
me to see Speedwell House in April, there were bluebells, primroses, cyclamen and periwinkles in bloom, poking out of ground ivy and grass: little bursts of brightness interrupting the lush green. I can’t wait for those spots of color to reappear next spring.

  In the distance, the water sparkles in the bright light like a flowing liquid diamond. On the other side of the river, there’s wooded hillside with a few wooden boathouses down at the bottom, and, above them, a scattering of pink, yellow and white cottages protruding from the greenery. From this distance, it looks as if someone has dropped pick-and-mix sweets from the window of an airplane and they’ve landed among the trees.

  Since we moved here, Alex has said at least three times, “It’s a funny thing about the English coastline: the land just stops. It’s like the interior of the country, and then it suddenly plunges into the sea without any interim bit. I mean, look.” At this point he always nods across the river. “That could be in the middle of the Peak District.”

  I don’t know what he means. Maybe I’m shallow, but I don’t much care about understanding the scenery. If it looks gorgeous, that’s good enough for me.

  Boats drift past: sailing dinghies, small yachts, pleasure boats and the occasional schooner. There’s one passing now that looks like a child’s sketch of a boat: wooden, with a mast and a red sail. Most have less elegant outlines and would be fiddlier to draw.

  These are the things I can see out of Ellen’s window. Can she see any of them? She’s looking out, but there’s a shut-off air about her, as if she’s not really present in the room with me.

  “El. What’s this?” I say again, waving the pieces of paper at her. I don’t like what I’ve read. I don’t like it at all, however imaginative and accomplished a piece of writing it might be for a fourteen-year-old. It scares me.

  “What’s what?” Ellen says tonelessly.

  “This family tree and beginning of a story about a family called the Ingreys.”

  “It’s for school.”

  Worst possible answer. Too short, too lacking in attitude. The Ellen I know—the Ellen I desperately miss—would have said, “Um, it’s a family tree? And a story about a family called the Ingreys? The answer’s kind of contained in the question.” How long has it been since she last yelled “Objection!” swiftly followed by “Sustained!”? At least a month.