Lasting Damage

by Sophie Hannah

  Lasting Damage

  Sophie Hannah

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Also by Sophie Hannah

  Little Face

  Hurting Distance

  The Point of Rescue

  The Other Half Lives

  A Room Swept White

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Sophie Hannah 2011

  The right of Sophie Hannah to be identified as the Author of the Work has been

  asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

  retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior

  written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of

  binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN 9781444711486

  Book ISBN 9780340980651

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Also by Sophie Hannah

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  11 Bentley Grove, Cambridge

  Saturday 24 July 2010

  One week earlier

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Friday 17 September 2010

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  For 7GR

  Saturday 24 July 2010

  I’m going to be killed because of a family called the Gilpatricks.

  There are four of them: mother, father, son and daughter. Elise, Donal, Riordan and Tilly. Kit tells me their first names, as if I’m keen to dispense with the formalities and get to know them better, when all I want is to run screaming from the room. Riordan’s seven, he says. Tilly’s five.

  Shut up, I want to yell in his face, but I’m too scared to open my mouth. It’s as if someone’s clamped and locked it; no more words will come out, not ever.

  This is it. This is where and how and when and why I’m going to die. At least I understand the why, finally.

  Kit’s as frightened as I am. More. That’s why he keeps talking, because he knows, as all those who wait in terror know, that when silence and fear combine, they form a compound a thousand times more horrifying than the sum of its parts.

  The Gilpatricks, he says, tears streaking his face.

  I watch the door in the mirror above the fireplace. It looks smaller and further away than it would if I turned and looked at it directly. The mirror is shaped like a fat gravestone: three straight sides and an arch at the top.

  I didn’t believe in them. The name sounded made up. Kit laughs, chokes on a sob. All of him is shaking, even his voice. Gilpatrick’s the sort of name you’d make up if you were inventing a person. Mr Gilpatrick. If only I’d believed in him, none of this would have happened. We’d have been safe. If I’d only . . .

  He stops, backs away from the locked door. He hears the same footsteps I hear – rushing, a stampede. They’re here.

  One week earlier

  Chapter 1

  Saturday 17 July 2010

  I lie on my back with my eyes closed, waiting for Kit’s breathing to change. I fake the deep, slow sleep-breaths I need to hear from him before I can get out of bed – in and hold, out and hold – and try to convince myself that it’s a harmless deception. Am I the only woman who has ever done this, or does it happen all the time in houses all over the world? If it does, then it must be for different reasons, more common ones than mine: a cheating wife or girlfriend wanting to text a lover undetected, or sneak one last guilty glass of wine on top of the five she’s had already. Normal things. Ordinary urgencies.

  No woman on earth has ever been in the situation I’m in now.

  You’re being ridiculous. You’re not ‘in a situation’, apart from the one you’ve brewed in your imagination. Ingredients: coincidence and paranoia.

  Nothing I tell myself works. That’s why I need to check, to put my mind at rest. Checking isn’t crazy; missing the opportunity to check would be crazy. And once I’ve looked and found nothing, I’ll be able to forget about it and accept that it’s all in my head.

  Will you?

  It shouldn’t be too long before I can move. Kit’s usually dead to the world within seconds of the light going out. If I count to a hundred . . . but I can’t. Can’t make myself focus on something that doesn’t interest me. If I could, I’d be able to do the reverse: banish 11 Bentley Grove from my mind. Will I ever be able to do that?

  While I wait, I rehearse for the task ahead. What would this bedroom tell me about Kit and me, if I didn’t know us? Huge bed, cast-iron fireplace, identical alcoves on either side of the chimney breast where our two identical wardrobes stand. Kit likes symmetry. One of his reservations, when I proposed buying the biggest bed we could find to replace our ordinary double, was that it might not leave room for our matching bedside cabinets. When I said I’d be happy to lose mine, Kit looked at me as if I was an anarchist agitator plotting to demolish his well-ordered world. ‘You can’t have a cabinet on one side and not the other,’ he said. Both ended up going in the end; having first made me promise not to tell anyone, Kit admitted that, however inconvenient it was to have to lean down and put his book, watch, glasses and mobile phone under the bed, he would find it more irritating to have a bedroom that didn’t ‘look right’.

  ‘Are you sure you’re a genuine, bona fide heterosexual?’ I teased him.

  He grinned. ‘Either I am, or else I’m pretending to be in order to get my Christmas cards written and posted for me every year. I guess you’ll never know which is the truth.’

  Floor-length cream silk curtains. Kit wanted a Roman blind, but I overruled him. Silk curtains are something I’ve wanted since childhood, one of those ‘as soon as I have a home of my own’ pledges I made to myself. And curtains in a bedroom have to pool on the floor – that’s my look-right rule. I suppose everybody has at least one, and we all think our own are sensible and other people’s completely ridiculous.

  Above the fireplace, there’s a framed tapestry of a red house with a green rectangle around it that’s supposed to be the garden. Instead of flowers, the solid colour of the grass is broken up by stitched words: ‘Melrose Cottage, Little Holling, Silsford’ in orange, and then, in smaller yellow letters beneath, ‘Connie and Kit, 13th July 2004’.

  ‘But Melrose isn’t red,’ I used to protest, before I gave up. ‘It’s made of white clunch stone. Do you think Mum was picturing it drenched in blood?’ Kit and I called our house ‘Melrose’ for short when we first bought
it. Now that we’ve lived here for years and know it like we know our own faces, we call it ‘Mellers’.

  What would an impartial observer make of the tapestry? Would they think Kit and I were so stupid that we were in danger of forgetting our names and when we bought our house? That we’d decided to hang a reminder on the wall? Would they guess that it was a home-made house-warming present from Connie’s mother, and that Connie thought it was twee and crass, and had fought hard to have it exiled to the loft?

  Kit insisted we put it up, out of loyalty to our home and to Mum. He said our bedroom was the perfect place, so that then guests wouldn’t see it. I don’t think he notices it any more. I do – every night before I go to sleep and every morning when I wake up. It depresses me for a whole range of reasons.

  Someone peering into our bedroom would see none of this – none of the wrangles, none of the compromises. They wouldn’t see Kit’s missing bedside table, the picture I’d have liked to put above the fireplace if only the hideous red house tapestry weren’t there.

  Which proves that looking at a room in someone else’s house doesn’t tell you anything, and there’s no point in my doing what I’m about to do, now that I’m sure Kit’s sound asleep. I ought to go to sleep too.

  As quietly as I can, I fold back my side of the duvet, climb out of bed and tiptoe to the second bedroom, which we’ve turned into a home office. We run our business from here, which is a little absurd given that it’s about eleven feet long by ten feet wide. Like Kit’s and my bedroom, it has a cast-iron fireplace. We’ve managed to cram two desks in here, a chair for each of us, three filing cabinets. When our certificate of incorporation arrived from Companies House, Kit bought a frame for it and hung it on the wall opposite the door, so that it’s the first thing that catches your eye when you walk into the room. ‘It’s a legal requirement,’ he told me when I complained that it looked uninspiring and bureaucratic. ‘Has to be displayed at company headquarters. Do you want Nulli to start life as an outlaw?’

  Nulli Secundus Ltd. It means ‘second to none’, and was Kit’s choice. ‘Talk about tempting fate and dooming us to failure,’ I said when we were discussing what to call ourselves, imagining how much worse liquidation would feel with such a conceited name. I suggested ‘C & K Bowskill Ltd’. ‘Those are our names,’ Kit said scathingly, as if this fact might have passed me by. ‘Have a bit of imagination, for God’s sake. Confidence would help, too. Are we launching this company in order to go bankrupt? I don’t know about you, but I’m planning to make a success of it.’

  What else have you made a success of, Kit? What else that I don’t know about?

  You’re being ridiculous, Connie. Your ridiculousness is second to none.

  I tap my laptop’s touchpad and it springs to life. The Google screen appears. I type ‘houses for sale’ into the search box, press enter, and wait. The first result that comes up is Roundthehouses.co.uk, which declares itself the UK’s leading property website. I click on it, thinking that obviously the Roundthehouses people subscribe to Kit’s way of thinking rather than mine: they have no worries about bankruptcy-induced humiliation.

  The home page loads: exterior shots of houses for sale beneath a dark red border filled in with lots of tiny pictures of magnifying glasses, each with a disembodied pair of eyes inside it. The eyes look eerie, alien, and make me think of people hiding in the darkness, spying on one another.

  Isn’t that exactly what you’re doing?

  I type ‘Cambridge’ into the location box, and click on the ‘For Sale’ button. Another screen comes up, offering me more choices. I work my way through them impatiently – search radius: this area only; property type: houses; number of bedrooms: any; price range: any; added to site . . . When would 11 Bentley Grove have been added? I click on ‘last 7 days’. The ‘For Sale’ board I saw in the front garden today – or yesterday, since it’s now quarter past one in the morning – wasn’t there a week ago.

  I click on ‘Find properties’, tapping my bare feet on the floor, and close my eyes for a second. When I open them, there are houses on the screen: one on Chaucer Road for 4 million pounds, one on Newton Road for 2.3 million. I know both streets – they’re near Bentley Grove, off Trumpington Road. I’ve seen them, on my many trips to Cambridge that nobody knows about.

  11 Bentley Grove is the third house on the list. It’s on for 1.2 million pounds. I’m surprised it’s so expensive. It’s big enough, but nothing spectacular. Obviously that part of Cambridge is regarded as a choice area, though it’s always looked fairly ordinary to me, and the traffic on Trumpington Road is often waiting to move rather than moving. There’s a Waitrose nearby, an Indian restaurant, a specialist wine shop, a couple of estate agents. And lots of enormous expensive mansions. If the asking prices for all the houses in this part of town are into the millions, that means there must be plenty of people who can afford to pay that much. Who are they? Sir Cliff Richard springs to mind; I’ve no idea why. Who else? People who own football clubs, or have oil wells in their back gardens? Certainly not me and Kit, and we’re doing about as well, professionally, as we could ever hope to do . . .

  I shake these thoughts from my mind. You could be asleep now, you lunatic. Instead, you’re sitting hunched over a computer in the dark, feeling inferior to Cliff Richard. Get a grip.

  To bring up the full details, I click on the picture of this house I know so well, and yet not at all. I don’t believe anyone in the world has spent as much time staring at the outside of 11 Bentley Grove as I have; I know its façade brick by brick. It’s strange, almost shocking, to see a photograph of it on my computer – in my house, where it doesn’t belong.

  Inviting the enemy into your home . . .

  There is no enemy, I tell myself firmly. Be practical, get it over with, and go back to bed. Kit has started to snore. Good. I’ve no idea what I’d say if he caught me doing this, how I’d defend my sanity.

  The page has loaded. I’m not interested in the big photograph on the left, the one taken from across the road. It’s the inside of the house I need to see. One by one, I click on the little pictures on the right-hand side of the screen to enlarge them. First, a kitchen with wooden worktops, a double Belfast sink, blue-painted unit fronts, a blue-sided wooden-topped island . . .

  Kit hates kitchen islands. He thinks they’re ugly and pretentious – an affectation imported from America. The avocado bathroom suites of the future, he calls them. He’d got rid of the one in our kitchen within a fortnight of our moving in, and commissioned a local joiner to make us a big round oak table to take its place.

  This kitchen I’m looking at can’t be Kit’s, not with that island in it.

  Of course it’s not Kit’s. Kit’s kitchen is downstairs – it also happens to be your kitchen.

  I click on a picture of a lounge. I’ve seen 11 Bentley Grove’s lounge before, though only briefly. On one of my visits, I was brave enough – or stupid enough, depending on your point of view – to open the gate, walk up the long path that’s bordered by lavender bushes on both sides and divides the square front lawn into two triangles, and peer in through the front window. I was afraid I’d be caught trespassing and couldn’t really concentrate. A few seconds later an elderly man with the thickest glasses I’ve ever seen emerged from the house next door and turned his excessively enlarged eyes in my direction. I hurried back to my car before he could ask me what I was doing, and, afterwards, remembered little about the room I’d seen apart from that it had white walls and a grey L-shaped sofa with some kind of intricate red embroidery on it.

  I’m looking at that same sofa now, on my computer screen. It’s not so much grey as a sort of cloudy silver. It looks expensive, unique. I can’t imagine there’s another sofa like it.

  Kit loves unique. He avoids mass-produced as far as is possible. All the mugs in our kitchen were made and painted individually by a potter in Spilling.

  Every piece of furniture in the lounge at 11 Bentley Grove looks like a one-off: a chair
with enormous curved wooden arms like the bottoms of rowing boats; an unusual coffee table with a glass surface, and, beneath the glass, a structure resembling a display cabinet with sixteen compartments, lying on its back. Each compartment contains a small flower with a red circle at its centre and blue petals pointing up towards the glass.

  Kit would like all of these things. I swallow, tell myself this proves nothing.

  There’s a tiled fireplace with a large map above it in a frame, a chimney breast, matching alcoves on either side. A symmetrical room, a Kit sort of room. I feel a little nauseous.

  Christ, this is insane. How many living rooms, up and down the country, follow this basic format: fireplace, a chimney breast, alcoves left and right? It’s a classic design, replicated all over the world. It appeals to Kit, and to about a trillion other people.

  It’s not as if you’ve seen his jacket draped over the banister, his stripy scarf over the back of a chair . . .

  Quickly, wanting to be finished with this task I’ve set myself – aware that it’s making me feel worse, not better – I work my way through the other rooms, enlarging their pictures. Hall and stairs, carpeted in beige; chunky dark wood banister. A utility room with sky-blue unit fronts, similar to those in the kitchen. Honey-coloured marble for the house bathroom – clean and ostentatiously expensive.

  I click on a picture of what must be the back garden. It’s a lot bigger than I’d have imagined, having only seen the house from the front. I scroll down to the text beneath the photographs and see that the garden is described as being just over an acre. It’s the sort of garden I’d love to have: decking for a table and chairs, two-seater swing with a canopy, vast lawn, trees at the bottom, lush yellow fields beyond. An idyllic countryside view, ten minutes’ walk from the centre of Cambridge. Now I’m starting to understand the 1.2-million-pound price tag. I try not to compare what I’m looking at to Melrose Cottage’s garden, which is roughly the size of half a single garage. It’s big enough to accommodate a wrought-iron table, four chairs, a few plants in terracotta pots, and not a lot else.