by Sara Foster
She stares at the door that divides them. Injustice and anger join forces inside her, rampaging through her veins until she feels she is dissolving. She stands unsteadily on the stairs, willing herself not to tumble, while also wondering if she should throw herself down them, anything to make that door open and gain admittance. In a crisis, why is she always left alone?
It’s the first time she’s seen Ian really angry and she doesn’t know what she can do to set this right. Now she can hear Naeve sobbing as well as Savannah. She pictures them sitting on his lap as he tries to comfort them. She hopes he isn’t lying to them, telling them it’s all going to be all right. She hopes he has more sense than that.
She imagines his fury, and wonders if she has spent her last night in this house. Her mind is a jumble of fear and accusation. This was meant to be her new start, miles away from anything. How can all her demons still find her?
When her thoughts run their course she finds she is still standing on this wide carpeted staircase, watching the closed door. She doesn’t want to be here when that door opens – she doesn’t want them to know she waited, or to catch her face unguarded. Perhaps she should go and pack, just in case. She tiptoes quietly back upstairs, reaches her room, sits on her bed and puts her hands over her ears, just as she had done as a child, when she hadn’t yet realised that the voices were coming from within.
6
the argument
Dickon Blythe knows that a small crowd of journalists are waiting at the door of his townhouse, each hoping to be the first to get a statement about his drowned daughter. He can picture the printing presses whirring across London. His two living children, Arabella’s older sisters, are already on international flights heading for London. He doesn’t care about any of it. He lies with his arms wrapped tightly around his wife, both of them lost between sobbing and sleep.
In the middle of the night, Eleanor wakes suddenly – there is someone in her room. She can make out a shape bobbing about in the darkness, a shadow right beside her bed. She scrambles up and backwards before her eyes adjust enough to realise that it is Savannah, but it doesn’t stop the series of haunted faces that flash through her brain. Nor does it stop the pounding in her throat, the sensation that any second something cataclysmic will overtake her.
Savannah climbs up next to her. ‘Mum and Dad are fighting,’ she says matter-of-factly, pushing her face into the hollow of the pillow, where Eleanor’s head lay a few moments ago. ‘They’re noisy.’ Other than this, Savannah doesn’t seem perturbed, and soon she has drifted back to sleep.
Eleanor does not settle so easily. She can hear the drumbeats of voices downstairs, angry, repetitive, banging against one another, the duel breaking the silence of the night. She is too far away to make out the words. She gets out of bed gently, tiptoeing to the door to open it a crack so she can try to listen better.
Once her door is open their voices are not so muffled. She’s two flights up but in this cavernous house, sound doesn’t have walls to contain it. It glides easily across landings and up open staircases.
‘Get away from me. How could you.’ Her aunt’s voice is enraged, wrung through with venom. Eleanor pictures Susan’s furious face, her hair pulled tightly into its bun, her eyes gleaming. Eleanor shudders for her uncle and takes another couple of steps down, trying to hear more.
As the staircase curves, she spots Naeve on the landing ahead of her. Her back is to Eleanor as she peers over the railing, her feet bare and her nightdress so filmsy that Eleanor can see the neat silhouette of her lithe body inside it. Before Eleanor can halt, her next step makes the tiniest creak on the stair and Naeve swings around in panic. Their eyes lock, but Naeve’s gaze travels straight through her, then she scurries quickly to her room and closes the door.
Eleanor glances back at her own open doorway. She should take refuge in the safety of the loft room. If she’s caught eavesdropping it will surely be the end of her stay. But she can’t help herself. She takes another three steps down, testing her weight before planting it firmly, praying there are no more telltale sounds of her feet on the wood, wishing this staircase was carpeted like the main staircase below.
‘Please just listen to me.’ She has never heard her uncle sound so pleading, so strained. ‘I’m so sorry. I will do everything I can to make things right.’
‘After everything we’ve been through, Ian . . . What are you trying to do to me?’
There’s a long pause where no one speaks, and then Ian starts again, his voice a little lower, and more resolute. ‘We can work this out, Susan, please.’ The pleading in his tone is clear. He is asking his wife for mercy.
Eleanor waits. In the silence she can hear every noise of the house, the tiny hum of the radiator, the distant thrum of a car engine. And yet, it still takes her longer than it should to realise that footsteps are heading up the stairs.
‘You know what – fuck you, Ian. Fuck you. I’m going to bed.’
Eleanor’s panic overcomes her urge to be quiet. She bolts up the stairs, making herself pause at the last moment to close the door gently. She leans against it, trying to recover her composure, looking at Savannah’s inert form on the bed.
Then someone taps on the wood right behind her head, sending a small vibration through her skull. She jumps, every nerve ending on fire, tensing as she hears her uncle’s voice say softly, ‘Eleanor?’
She doesn’t dare answer, but she feels terrible. They know she was snooping, and now they are going to tell her to go.
She waits. Even breathing seems loud and dangerous. When nothing else happens, she starts to relax, ever so slightly, although she doesn’t dare move from her place leaning against the door.
Then Aunt Susan’s voice reaches her. ‘You know this is the worst time for a house guest, Ian. Especially one who comes home paralytic in the early hours of the morning.’
‘Sssh. Don’t you think I know that?’ His voice is trailing away as he speaks. ‘I thought it would be good for all of us to have her here. What do you want me to do?’
Eleanor presses her ear hard to the wood, but whatever Susan says next is lost within distance and footsteps. Eleanor steps away from the door, staring at it, trying to calm herself. They know she was in a state last night, yet neither of them has discussed it with her. Now she has no choice but to wait and see what they do in the morning.
Ian doesn’t feel so much like an ally any more.
The cream walls seem to press in around her, urging her to fling open her case and pack her things before she has to suffer the indignity of being asked to leave. She turns and looks at the snug little body asleep under her duvet, and wonders what her aunt and uncle would make of their youngest child seeking refuge from them with the niece they are about to evict. Why does she feel so responsible for these two young girls in the house? Why does the sight of them wandering around in the night, sleepy and vulnerable, make her want to curl up and cry?
Eleanor is tense as she climbs back into bed. Savannah is still sound asleep. It occurs to her that if her aunt and uncle were to check on Savvie there might be pandemonium if she’s not in her bed. But after half an hour of silence, Eleanor relaxes enough to close her eyes. In the morning she will have to talk to Ian and ask him if he wants her to leave. She tries to tell herself that it will be a relief. There are more cracks in her uncle and aunt’s marriage than in a Grecian urn, and she doesn’t need to add their complications to hers. And yet, however hostile the atmosphere is here, right now it feels safer than being on her own.
She snuggles down into the bedclothes for a while, but no matter how she tries, sleep has gone and she can’t convince it to return for her. She wants to switch the light on, but she’s worried about waking Savvie. She reaches for her phone instead, intending to browse online, but stops as she sees three messages from her mum.
Eleanor, please answer me. I just want to check you’re okay.
Eleanor?
Eleanor, I’m getting worried. If you don’t answer me so
on I’m going to ring Ian before I go to bed.
Eleanor can’t type fast enough. Mum, I’m fine. PLEASE don’t stress if you don’t hear from me straightaway. Had a tough day at work – someone died unexpectedly. Everyone is upset.
She rereads the message then deletes the last two sentences, letting it finish at straightaway. There’s no reason this information should upset her mother, on the other side of the world and not involved, and yet she knows it will make her worry all the more. When Eleanor thinks of her mother she feels guilty for coming here in the first place. They have spent the past ten years with only each other to lean on, and it had been her mother doing most of the supporting, while Eleanor went through various medications and therapy so she could try to blot out the nightmares and function somewhere near normal. So, instead, she finishes the message with, How are you?
She has only just laid the phone down on her bedside table when it buzzes with a reply. She picks it up again.
I’m fine. I miss you.
Eleanor lies very still, staring at those words for so long that the phone gives up waiting for her to type anything and its light fades away. It seems that her mother is able to reach halfway across the world to wrap an ethereal hand around Eleanor’s heart, squeezing it over and over.
Eventually she types, Miss you too. Going to sleep now. Then she switches the phone off before her mother can ask her what she’s doing up at this hour, or anything else she might try to keep the conversation going.
She lies down and pulls the duvet around her, tugging it across from Savvie, who shifts in her sleep and lets out a sigh. She stays there for a long time, but she can’t get her arms or her feet to warm up properly, not even when Savvie rolls over and snuggles close enough to lend her some warmth. She’s unused to having a person pressed against her, their flesh soft and vulnerable.
Eventually, her head drifts, but she keeps coming to with a start, feeling the darkness press against her. Her ghosts whisper – telling her that someday she will be laid out cold too, just like Arabella is tonight.
7
saturday
Detective Inspector Priya Prashad wakes before dawn, thinking of Arabella Lane, that fragile body on the slab. Adrenalin courses through her so swiftly that she chooses to forgo her usual stop for a double espresso and heads straight to work. On cases like this, trails can go cold fast. They need to get on top of the CCTV, the evidence, the suspects. Chances are, if there was foul play, it will have been committed by someone Arabella knew.
When Eleanor wakes up, for a brief moment she has forgotten everything. Facts lag five seconds behind consciousness, but the most important one returns to her quickly: Arabella Lane is dead.
Savannah is no longer snuggled next to her, and the bedclothes have turned cool and uninviting. She gets up and goes to the window, hoping for distraction, but it’s the same view she has found herself looking at every morning since arriving. So far, winter in London is not living up to Eleanor’s expectations. Since the beginning of December she has been rushing to the window in her loft room each morning, hoping the urban scene will have transformed and she’ll find herself in the midst of a Dickensian snow globe. It has been four weeks and the closest she’s got has been a couple of rounds of hail, but she has witnessed more rain than she has ever seen in her life. Half a world away, during her childhood they had spent the late summer months willing the heavens to open. Here everyone has been praying for a break from it since September. How clever can nature be, really, if it can’t figure out how to share its basic spoils equally across the planet?
Eleanor has come to know other things about a northern hemisphere winter. The English rain is unforgiving, injecting cold, merciless water through the linings of coats and shoes and gloves; deluges collect in puddles where the road meets the kerb so that car wheels can spray unlucky pedestrians with only a slight adjustment of steering. This city is wet and dark and cold, yet Eleanor is mesmerised by the rainbows of colour, the swirling symphony of light and sound, the ceaseless movement – so many people packed together, managing to negotiate their way around each another on the roads, the Tube, the buses, the laneways, the skyscrapers. She daydreams of flying over the city and following a few people here and there – the hidden army of cleaners out while it’s dark, removing and repainting and repolishing the city structures, back in their beds by the time the second, suited army marches through, the drones behind computers and the slick city types with their deals and double-deals. It’s only a few Tube stops between mansions and ghettos, a few hundred metres between parliament and the tramps asleep on benches in Westminster Square, a few footsteps between the hottest clubs and the dingy back alleys. It’s hard to be confined to one place at a time. She wants to witness it all, absorb every facet of life into herself, see if it can help shape her ambitions into something more than the best routes of escape.
She takes a quick shower in the en suite and dresses in jeans and a jumper. As she heads downstairs, she recalls the argument last night and her tread on the stairs is tentative. She hasn’t yet encountered Susan alone in the house, and she doesn’t want this to be the moment.
There are noises from the kitchen – a drawer rattling, the microwave pinging. When Eleanor peeps around the door, she sees Naeve busy making her breakfast. ‘Where is everyone?’ Eleanor asks, relieved, coming in and taking a mug down from the frosted glass cabinet.
‘Mummy and Savvie are still asleep, I think,’ Naeve says. ‘Though Mummy might be working on her laptop in bed. Daddy has gone.’
Eleanor stiffens. ‘What do you mean, gone?’
‘He came in this morning to see me, before he left. He has some business to do across town today.’
Eleanor sits down at the table. Her brain is humming with scenarios and possibilities. Could this be to do with the argument last night? What is Ian trying to fix?
Then it hits her: there is no one here to protect her from Susan. A nervous prickle works its way through her body. Why does she feel she needs protection? Is she really frightened of her aunt?
‘When will he be back?’
Naeve shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’
Eleanor’s thoughts tumble over themselves in a rush. She feels giddy as she stands up and pushes her chair back. It makes a harsh noise, and she grabs for it. She doesn’t want to do anything to alert Susan to the fact she is awake.
‘Are you okay?’ Naeve is frowning at her.
‘Yes, yes,’ Eleanor mumbles, despite the tingling in her fingers, her lips, her toes. She has to get out of this house until she has had a chance to compose herself. She stands up in a rush, but as she turns for the door, Susan is there, blocking her way.
Even at this early hour, Susan is dressed as though she’s going out for lunch. Her black silk blouse is perfectly ironed; her pencil skirt hugs her slim thighs, and her hair is up in that elegant bun. Eleanor tugs self-consciously at her casual clothing, remembering she hasn’t even brushed her teeth. She fears she looks slovenly, and the way Susan is regarding her does nothing to dispel her worries.
‘Eleanor, I have to go out for a little while this morning,’ Susan announces. ‘Would you mind looking after the girls?’
There is barely a question in the way she asks. Susan knows Eleanor will say yes, of course she will, because Susan controls everything. It doesn’t matter, thank goodness, because Eleanor loves Naeve and Savannah, but she feels for them too. It’s clear Susan’s priorities lie elsewhere for much of the time.
‘No problem. Do you have any instructions for us?’
Susan smiles thinly. ‘I know Savannah would love to go ice skating in the park. Would you like that too, Naeve?’
Naeve doesn’t even look at her mother, she just shrugs. Susan doesn’t respond, as though this is normal. She opens her wallet and pulls out a note. ‘This should cover it.’
Eleanor reaches across to take it. ‘Thank you.’
Is it her imagination, or does Susan hold on to the money a fraction longer than she shoul
d? Eleanor looks up sharply and meets her aunt’s eyes. Susan’s gaze is so cold that it is hard not to flinch, but a surge of courage helps Eleanor stand her ground. She stares back – silently saying, I know you have secrets. And I know what it’s like to try to hide them. The question is, can they stay hidden forever?
The moment is gone so fast that when the crisp fifty-pound note is in her hand, Eleanor is unsure whether anything really just happened. Susan turns to go, then pauses. ‘Oh, and Eleanor, please don’t let Savannah sleep in your bed again.’
Moments later the front door closes, and Eleanor and the girls are alone.
8
ice skating
‘Toxicology is just in,’ Detective Sergeant Steve Kirby tells Priya as she meets him by the back entrance to the station. ‘Alcohol, painkillers, cocaine and rohypnol were all in Arabella’s system the night she died.
‘She was off her face,’ he adds as they get into their unmarked car. ‘Perhaps she jumped in while she was high and no one saw her.’
‘Maybe,’ Priya murmurs, her mind running through possibilities. But she already has a hunch that this case won’t be quite as simple as that.
An hour later, Eleanor and the girls are hurrying through Hyde Park along the Broad Walk and past the Round Pond. Savannah is a few paces ahead, striding quickly along, while Naeve trudges by Eleanor’s side with her hands in her pockets.
The huge Winter Wonderland funfair is set up in a corner of the park. The stalls are already steaming with fried food, while the skyline is dominated by a Ferris wheel and a giant glistening Christmas tree. Savannah flits between the throngs of people, agog at everything she sees, while Eleanor tries desperately to keep sight of her amid bulky parka jackets and winter boots, also making sure she doesn’t lose Naeve.