by Camilla Way
“No,” she answered, and tilted her head to one side as she continued to consider me. “No, Mummy. It wasn’t me.”
I left her standing by the bed and ran downstairs to the kitchen. And there was Lucy’s cage, its door swung open, the headless body lying on the floor beside it cold and stiff. I looked around the room, my eyes darting wildly about. How had she done it? What had she used? She had no access to the kitchen knives, of course. Suddenly a thought struck me and I ran back up the stairs to her bedroom. And there it was. The metal ruler from Doug’s toolbox, lying on her table. I’d heard her asking him for it the day before—for something she was making, she’d said. It lay there now, next to her craft things, and I stared down at it as nausea rose in me.
I hadn’t heard Hannah follow me from the kitchen until she slipped into the room and stood beside me. “Mummy?” she said.
My heart jumped. “What?”
Her eyes fell to my belly. “Is it all right?”
The slight lisp, that pretty, melodic voice of hers, so adorable—everybody commented on it. I bit back my revulsion. “What?” I asked. “Is what all right?”
She considered me. “The baby, Mummy. The little baby in your tummy. Is it all right? Or is it dead too?”
I put a hand to my belly as defensively as if she’d struck me there. Her gaze bored into me. “Why would the baby be dead?” I whispered. “Why would you say that?” There’s no way she could have known, of course, that she’d touched upon my greatest fear—that this new baby, our second miracle, would not survive, would not be born alive. It was the stress of my relationship with Hannah that caused this paranoia, I think. I almost felt as though I would deserve it, because I’d made such a mess of everything with her. My unborn baby would be taken from me, as penance.
As I gazed into her eyes, fear stroked the back of my neck. “Stay right here,” I said. “Stay here until I say.”
* * *
—
That night I described to Doug what had happened. “What are we going to do?” I asked him. “What the hell are we going to do?”
“We don’t know it was Hannah,” he said weakly.
“Well, who the hell was it, then?”
“Maybe . . . God, I don’t know! Maybe it was a fox, or one of the neighbors’ kids mucking about?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!”
“We have foxes in the garden all the time,” he said. “Are you sure the back door was closed?”
“Well, no,” I admitted, “it was open. But . . .”
“We’ve had to tell Hannah before about leaving the cage door unfastened,” he added.
This was also true: she loved to feed Lucy, and though she knew she wasn’t allowed to open the door without me there, it was possible she had fiddled with the latch. “Okay, but what about what she said about the baby?” I demanded.
Doug rubbed his face tiredly. “She’s five years old, Beth. She doesn’t understand about death yet, does she? Maybe she’s feeling anxious about having a new sibling.”
I stared at him. “I can’t believe you’re saying this! I know it was Hannah. It was written all over her face!”
“Well, where were you?” he said, his voice rising too. “Where the hell were you when all this was going on? Why weren’t you watching her?”
“Don’t you dare make this my fault,” I shouted. “Don’t you dare do that!” On we argued, our worry and distress causing us to turn on each other, sniping and defensive.
“Mummy? Daddy?” Hannah appeared in the doorway, looking sleepy and adorable in her pink pajamas. She held her teddy in her hand. “Why are you shouting?”
Doug got to his feet. “Hello, little one,” he said, his voice suddenly jolly. “How’s my princess? Got a cuddle for your daddy?”
She nodded and edged closer, but then said in a small, sad voice, “Is it because of Lucy?”
Doug and I exchanged a look. He picked her up. “You know how it happened?”
She shook her head. “Mummy thinks I did it, but I never did! Mummy loves her birdie and so do I.” Tears welled, then spilled from her eyes. “I would never, ever hurt Lu-Lu bird.”
Doug held her close. “I know you wouldn’t, of course you wouldn’t. It was just somebody playing a nasty trick, that’s all. Or a fox. Maybe a naughty fox did it. Come on, little one, don’t cry, please don’t cry. Let’s get you back to bed.” I knew that he was fooling himself, too scared to admit the truth, but I’d never felt so lonely, so wretched, as I did at that moment. As they left the kitchen, I looked up and caught Hannah watching me over her father’s shoulder, her expression impassive now. We held each other’s gaze before they turned the corner and disappeared from view.
FOUR
LONDON, 2017
When Clara answered her intercom, it was Mac’s voice she heard, crackling back at her as though from a different world: an innocent, ordinary place where e-mails weren’t sent that stopped your heart from beating, that turned your blood to ice. “Jesus,” he said after she’d buzzed him up, “you look awful. I tried you at work, but they said you hadn’t come back after lunch, so . . .” He paused. “Clara? Are you all right?”
Without replying, she led him to the computer and pointed at the screen. “Read these,” she said.
Obediently he sat. She watched him as he read, his head bowed, thick black hair sticking out in all directions, his rangy six-foot frame hunched uncomfortably in the small office chair, as though he might uncoil and come springing out of it at any moment, like a jack-in-the-box. It was good to see him, the band of fear that had been wrapping itself ever tighter round her chest loosening a fraction.
Mac had been Luke’s closest friend since school and spent almost as much time at their flat as they did. He was life as she’d known it only twenty-four hours before: nights out at the Reliance, evenings in with beers and a box set, long, hungover Sunday lunches in the Owl and Pussycat, private jokes and shared history, the comfort and ease of old friendship. He was the mainstay of her and Luke’s relationship, witness to their happy, normal life—before everything had become so entirely not normal, before the creeping awareness that everything was very far from normal indeed.
“Holy shit,” he said, when he’d read the last message.
“Did you know about them?” she demanded.
He glanced at her sheepishly. “Well, yeah, Luke told me he’d been getting dodgy e-mails, but I didn’t realize they were this bad, that there were so many of them.”
Clara’s voice rose in frustration. “Then why the hell didn’t he tell me? I can’t believe he kept them from me. They’re so nasty—some of them are fucking sick.”
“Yeah,” Mac said. “He, um, he didn’t want you to worry. . . .”
“Oh for God’s sake!”
“I know, I know. I think he was embarrassed they’re from a woman.”
“Are you kidding me? Whoever this nutcase is broke into my flat! She’s been threatening my boyfriend. What the hell was Luke playing at not telling me about it?” She looked at him sharply. “Does he know who she is?”
Emphatically Mac shook his head. “No. Honestly, Clara, I don’t think he’s got a clue.”
She went to the screen and read the last e-mail aloud. “‘I’m coming for you.’ I mean, what the fuck?” She looked around for her phone. “I’m going to call the police.”
Mac got up. “I’m pretty sure they won’t do anything until he’s been missing twenty-four hours. Look, Clara, I think these e-mails are from some weirdo who wants to rattle Luke—an ex maybe—but I really doubt they have anything to do with him not coming home last night.”
“Well, where the bloody hell is he, then?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps he’s just gone away for a wee while to clear his head.”
“Clear his head? Why on earth would he need to clear his head?”
B
ut Mac’s eyes slid away from hers and instead of replying, he said, “I’ve called all his friends, but I guess he could be at his parents’ place. Have you tried there?”
The question made Clara pause. “No, not yet.”
“Maybe you should check with them. It’s the first thing the police will do.”
She thought for a moment. Mac was right. His mum and dad’s house in Suffolk was the obvious place Luke would go—in fact, she was surprised it hadn’t occurred to her before. Luke was closer to his parents than anyone she’d ever known. Perhaps the e-mails had rattled him enough to make him want to get out of London for a few days. But in that case, why hadn’t he told her?
Looking down at her phone, she hesitated. “What if he’s not there, though? You know what his mum and dad are like—they’ll be beside themselves.”
“Aye, you’re not wrong there.”
She and Mac stared at each other, both thinking the same thing: Emily.
* * *
—
Luke never talked about his elder sister, and Clara knew only the bare facts: that when she was eighteen, Emily had walked out of the family home and was never heard from again. He’d been ten years old at the time, his brother Tom, fifteen. He had told Clara a few months after they’d started dating, one night at his old place in Peckham, a shared flat off Queens Road in a dilapidated Victorian terrace, where at night they would lie in bed and listen to the music and voices carrying from the bars and restaurants squeezed into the railway arches across the street, trains thundering over the elevated tracks above.
“And you’ve no idea what happened to her?” she’d asked, astonished by his story.
Luke had shrugged, and when he’d spoken again, there was a heaviness to his voice she’d not heard before. “No, none of us had a clue. She just walked out one day. Left a note saying she was leaving home, and we never heard from her again. It totally destroyed my family; my parents never got over it. Mum had a nervous breakdown and in the end it was better to never mention her. All the pictures of her got put away. Everyone just stopped talking about her.”
Clara had sat up, appalled. “But that’s awful! You were only ten—you must have wanted to talk about her. It must have devastated you and your brother too.”
The hand that had been stroking her leg paused. “We learned it was better not to, I suppose.”
“But . . . was there—I mean, weren’t the police involved?”
He shook his head. “She went of her own free will. I think that was the hardest part for my mum and dad—she left a note saying she was going, but no explanation as to why or where. My dad told me they hired a private detective to try to find her, but it didn’t come to anything.” He shrugged. “She just completely vanished.”
And in that moment she’d understood something about Luke that had always puzzled her. Something she’d glimpsed hovering behind the laughter and the jokes, his need to be the life and soul of every party, a sorrow flickering barely there at the edges of him she hadn’t quite been able to put her finger on before.
“What was she like?” she’d asked softly.
He smiled. “She was ace. She was funny and sweet but kind of . . . fierce, you know? I was only ten, and I guess I’m biased, but I don’t think you meet many people like her. She was so passionate about stuff. She’d go off on all these rallies and marches: save the whales, women’s rights—you name it. Drove Mum and Dad mad because she’d never stay still and get on with her schoolwork. I was just a kid, but even then I admired her for it, how principled she was, how sure she was about what was right and wrong. And she was a free spirit, you know?” He sighed and rubbed his face. “Maybe our house was too restrictive for her and she wanted her freedom. Who knows? Maybe that’s why she went.”
“I’m so sorry,” Clara had said quietly. “I can’t imagine how hard that must have been for you all.”
He got up then, crossing the room to pull a book down from its shelf, then handed it to her. It was a thin volume of children’s poems. T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. “She gave me this a few months before she left,” he told her. “She used to read it to me when I was a kid. It was . . .” He stopped. “Well, anyway. That’s kind of all I have left of her.”
Reverently, Clara had opened it and read aloud the message written on the flyleaf. “‘For Mungojerrie, from Rumpelteazer. Love you, kiddo. Always, E xx.’ Mungojerrie?” Clara had queried, and he’d smiled.
“They’re the names of the cats in one of the poems—her favorite one.”
He’d been silent for a while then, before finally saying, “Anyway, it’s all in the past now,” and he’d taken the book from her hands and pulled her toward him and started kissing her again, to stop her questions, she’d sensed. Whenever she’d tried to bring Emily up after that, he’d simply shrug and change the subject, until eventually she’d given up, though she’d found herself thinking about her often, the missing sister of her boyfriend, who’d walked away from home one day, never to be heard from again.
Now, with sudden decisiveness, she said to Mac, “I’m going to drive over there.”
His eyebrows shot up. “To Suffolk? How long will that take?”
She looked around for her keys and bag. “An hour and a half tops. At least I’ll be doing something. I can’t just sit here waiting for him. I feel like I’m going mad. And I think you’re right—I think that’s where he’ll be. He’s so close to his mum and dad. And if he has gone there because he’s freaked out by the e-mails, I’d prefer to talk to him face-to-face.”
“Okay,” Mac said slowly, “but what if he’s not?”
She glanced at him. “Then I’ll call the police, which is another reason why I should warn Rose and Oliver first. Will you stay here in case he does come back?”
Mac nodded and patted his laptop bag. “Sure, I’ve a load of pictures to edit—might as well work here as anywhere else.”
She hesitated. “Will you call the hospitals too?”
“Clara, I really don’t think anything . . .”
“Please, Mac.”
He held his hands up in defeat. “Okay, sure.”
* * *
—
As soon as Clara got into her car, she phoned her office, then put her mobile on hands free, before setting off across town toward the M11. She was almost at the North Circular before her editor grudgingly accepted her explanation of “personal problems” and agreed she could have the next day off. After that, she phoned Lauren, who confirmed there’d still been no word from Luke all day. Finally she asked to be put through to the security desk, where she reached George, the guard who’d been on duty the night before. He told her that Luke had left the building via the back entrance at around seven thirty, that they’d had a brief chat about the football and there’d seemed nothing wrong. “You know Luke.” He chuckled. “Always got a smile on his face.”
As she drove through the London streets, she thought about Luke’s parents. She remembered how nervous she’d been the first time he’d brought her to the Willows, his childhood home in Suffolk. Rose and Oliver had sounded so impressive, so very much larger-than-life—and so very different from her own mum and dad.
It had been a morning in late May. The house they drew up to stood alone, stark against the bleak beauty of the Suffolk landscape, the seemingly endless flat fields, the sky vast and blue and cloudless above them. Luke had led her around the side of the building through to a long and sweeping garden, its borders a carefully controlled riot of color, a white lilac tree at its center heavy with flowers that filled the air with their sweet powdery scent. “Wow,” she’d murmured, and Luke had smiled. “My mum’s pride and joy. You should see the parties she throws here every summer. The whole village comes along—it’s insane.” And then there, at the far end of the garden, kneeling at a flower bed, pruning shears in hand, had been Rose. She’d stood up whe
n she heard them approach, and Clara’s belly had dipped with apprehension. What would this woman, this cultured, educated retired surgeon, think of her? Would she like her, think her good enough for her son?
But then Rose had smiled, and walked toward them, and in that instant Clara had known everything would be okay. This slim, pretty, fresh-faced woman in a pink summer dress was not in the least intimidating. Instead, Clara had been bowled over by Rose’s charm, the way her eyes lit up when she smiled, the genuine warmth with which she’d hugged her, her infectious, enthusiastic way of talking. Rose had led her into the kitchen that first day and, patting her hand, had said, “Come and have a drink and tell me all about yourself, Clara. It’s so lovely to have you here.”
Oliver, Luke’s dad, had emerged from somewhere out of the depths of the house, a tall and bearded bear of a man, Luke’s features mirrored in his own, his son’s kindness and good humor shining from his almost identical brown eyes. He was a university lecturer, the author of several books on art history. Slightly shy, he was quieter and more reserved than his wife, but Clara had warmed to him instantly.
In fact, she’d fallen in love with everything about the Lawsons that day: their beautiful, rambling house, the easy affection they’d shown one another, even the way they argued and joked, good-naturedly mocking one another’s flaws—Oliver’s messiness and tendency toward hypochondria, Rose’s bossy perfectionism, or Luke’s inability to lose at anything without sulking. It was a revelation to Clara, who’d grown up in a house where even the smallest of perceived slights could lead to weeks of offended silence. She had been conscious, that first visit to the Willows, of the strangest feeling of déjà vu, as though she’d returned after a long absence to somewhere she’d once known well, the place where she was always meant to be.