She must have felt me stiffen because she pulls back. ‘You OK?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, sorry, it’s just you’re wearing the same perfume as my sister does, took me a second or two to place it.’
She laughs. ‘Dior,’ she says, ‘Gift from my new man, actually. Like it?’
I nod. ‘Smells lovely.’
She grins. ‘Can only hope I’m the only woman he’s buying it for, right?’
I nod, smile weakly. She turns as if to go and I hesitate. She’s right in front of me. I am so sick of worrying, I’ve got enough to think about without this as well. I could just ask her.
‘Gilly,’ I say. ‘I – I don’t want to be intrusive and, well, this probably sounds mad, but I – I overheard you on the phone the other day.’
The expression on her face changes slightly, hardens. I take a deep breath. I’ve started now, I have to keep going. Even if she gets annoyed.
‘You heard me on the phone?’
I nod. ‘Yes, I was – I was about to knock on your door, I wanted to talk to you, and I heard you on the phone talking about – well, talking about an architecture firm.’
There is a pause. My heart is hammering. What am I going to do if she mentions Dad? I haven’t thought any further ahead than asking her, seeing what she says.
She’s sighing, shaking her head. ‘Oh, Corinne. I’m sorry you had to hear that – it’s just, the subject gets me really wound up. It’s the reason we divorced, in the end. We lost so much money and my husband just . . . well, he couldn’t cope. Wanted to get lawyers in, sue the bastards. I wanted to leave it.’ She blows out her cheeks. ‘He still won’t let it lie.’
I swallow. ‘I’m so sorry, that must have been awful.’
She nods. ‘Oh, God, it was. Bastards. They’re still doing business, you know. Company called Seymour Sheppard, based over in Holland Park. God knows how many other lives they ruined, how much money they’re scamming people out of as we speak.’
I stare at her, weak with relief. ‘Oh God,’ I say. ‘I thought . . .’
She’s staring at me. ‘You thought what? Are you OK? You’re white as a sheet.’
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘It’s nothing. Sorry, I . . . well, I recognised you, actually. My dad was an architect, and I think you once came to his old office, in Hampstead, you probably don’t remember. But it came to me the other day, when I saw you with your ex, I realised where I’d seen you before and then I got it in my head that maybe . . . maybe it’d been my dad’s firm, you know, the one you dealt with. But it wasn’t. It obviously wasn’t.’ I try to laugh. ‘I’m just going quietly mad.’
She tilts her head to one side, frowning.
‘God, I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘I really don’t remember – how odd. But no, Seymour Sheppard, big firm in West London, that’s who we went with in the end. We got quotes from quite a few people though – your dad must’ve been one of them. How funny!’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘yes, it is. Goodness, I’m so sorry you went through all that, Gilly. And I’m sorry for bringing it up again now.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ she says, ‘It doesn’t matter a bit. I’m just glad it wasn’t your old man – that could’ve made things a bit awkward!’ She laughs, the gasping sound. ‘Now you ought to get yourself inside, put your feet up. God knows you’ll be doing none of that once the baby arrives!’ She smiles at me and I nod, give her a shaky grin and say I’ll see her soon. She hurries off to the stairwell.
I stare after her for a minute, stupidly relieved. All that worry for nothing. She must be telling the truth – why would she lie? I fumble for my keys, shaking my head. I think of her crouched down by the flat door, the expression of surprise on her face when I told her I was pregnant. She didn’t know. She couldn’t have sent me the bootees. I knew she hadn’t. Why would she?
I put my key in the lock and go into our flat. I snap the kitchen light on and stick one of the scans straight on the fridge, fasten it with a little red heart magnet so Dom will see it straight away. There. Perfect.
I turn around, start running through the cupboards in my head, trying to think of something good to make, filling my brain with a chatter of options to stop my thoughts from spiralling. Risotto? Pasta? A nice curry? Tomorrow night Ashley and Mum are coming to London and we’re going out for dinner somewhere near the cemetery, so it would be good to use up the leftover peppers in the fridge.
Pleased, I get the chopping board out, reach for a knife. My fingers meet air. My best knife is gone. Did I leave it in the sink? Dom was supposed to do the washing-up last night.
I go to look, and at first glance I don’t even see the worst of it.
I see a doll, lying in the stainless steel basin, her dark brown hair spread out like a fan around her head, her smooth plastic skin perfectly pale, her red lips painted beautifully. It’s Beatrice, it’s got to be. She was my favourite when I was a little girl. Dad brought her back one night in a big gold package, tied up with a bow. The sight of her is so familiar that it brings a hot rush of tears to my eyes and before I can really think what I’m doing I reach forward, pick her up, and it’s then that I see.
She’s been cut open, her red velvet dress has a gaping hole in the middle, right across her stomach, right where her womb would be. The cut is deep and dark; when I part the folds of her dress I see that it goes all the way through to the other side of her plastic body. I scream loudly, drop her back into the sink. I slowly back away from the kitchen, my heart bumping in my chest. My brain is filling up with panic; the walls feel as though they are hemming me in. I spin around, my eyes darting around the room. Empty. What the hell? I need Dominic, but he isn’t here, I’m all alone, and so I turn and I run from the kitchen, and I slam the bathroom door behind me, closing Beatrice in.
42
London
Dominic
Dominic feels a little bit drunk. He is still sitting in the bar with Erin, chatting, as the light fades outside. It is the relief of being out of the house, talking to someone else, stepping away from the constant worry he has for Corinne. Not that he’d change things, not for anything, but he wishes he could figure out how to help her. It’s nice to have a friend to talk to. Still, he ought to get going soon. Another pint and he’ll be struggling.
They chat a bit more about Erin’s court case, the woman on trial for the death of her daughter.
‘It’s just so sad,’ Dom says. ‘I mean, maybe it’s something to do with the fact that I’m about to become a parent, but I just can’t understand how you could ever hurt your child. It’s mad to me, it’s just inconceivable. God.’ He shakes his head. ‘Poor kid of ours is going to be spoiled rotten if I’ve got anything to do with it.’
Erin doesn’t say anything, traces a shape in a patch of spilled liquid on the tabletop.
‘I know,’ she says eventually, ‘it’s a horrible case. Awful. It’s been hard writing it up, to be honest. Glad it’s over now.’ She looks suddenly very sad, and Dominic feels bad. He hadn’t meant to upset her, knows only too well how harrowing court cases like that can be. He tries to change the subject, starts to tell her about overhearing Alison in the office.
‘She was on about some deal, it was weird,’ he says, but Erin isn’t listening. She’s staring at him, her head resting on her hands.
He stops talking.
‘Penny for your thoughts?’ he asks her.
‘Oh,’ she looks suddenly vulnerable, her blue eyes big in her face. Dominic thinks of Andy ignoring her in the office, of the things she must have had to listen to in court. He doesn’t know why people want to hear that stuff.
‘You OK?’ he says, raising his eyebrows at her over his pint glass.
She shakes her head as though clearing water from her ears. ‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘Just remembering something, that’s all.’
43
London
Dominic
The taxi splashes through the wet London roads as Dominic makes his way home from the bar. The city lo
oks darker tonight somehow, there is something menacing about the slick hiss of the pavements. He glances at his watch; it is later than he thought. He’s had too much beer, he should have stopped after the first one. It had just been such a relief to be sitting out in a bar, talking to someone else, making conversation that didn’t revolve around doll houses or IVF. Dominic winces at his own thoughts. He shouldn’t think like that. The alcohol is making him mean.
The taxi drops him off outside their building. Dominic sees a figure in the downstairs hallway, waiting at the window, and panics when he sees it is Corinne. Why is she down here?
Corinne’s feet are bare and her skin when he touches her is freezing. Goosebumps cover her arms, the hairs on her flesh standing on end.
‘What are you doing?’ he asks her. ‘Why aren’t you in the flat?’
‘I can’t go back in there, Dominic.’
Her eyes are red; she is holding something in her hands. He stares at her in confusion and she wordlessly thrusts it towards him. The sight of it pushes everything from his mind.
She is holding a little doll. It has a beautifully painted face and long brown ringlets, is clad in a red velvet dress. There is a giant hole in its stomach, cutting through the plastic. The edges of the hole are jagged and sharp.
‘What the hell is that?’
Corinne begins to cry. He takes her in his arms; it is later than he realised, gone eleven at night.
‘Where have you been, Dominic? Where have you been?’ She is crying hard now, her breath speeding up. ‘Look at this! Someone left it in the sink. Someone is getting into this flat. I told you! I told you! We need to call the police.’
‘Slow down, slow down. Start from the beginning.’
She takes a deep breath.
‘I came home. I was going to make dinner. I thought I’d do a risotto. I . . . I needed a knife so I looked for the big silver one, the one your mum bought us and . . . and –’ She covers her face with her hands. ‘I found her there. Lying in the sink. Someone cut her open with the knife, it’s nowhere, it’s not here. They’ve taken it with them. Oh God.’ Her voice becomes a wail. They stare at the doll together. Its plastic eyes stare back. Dominic takes a deep breath, tries to think. Corinne is frightening him, her eyes are wild.
‘Do you want to stay down here while I go check the flat?’
‘No!’
He takes her hand. Together they climb the stairs to the flat and go inside. It is empty; there is nobody there. There is no sign of any breakage – whoever got in came through the front door.
‘The knife’s missing,’ Corinne says again. ‘The big kitchen knife. They’ve used it to cut Beatrice then taken it.’
Dominic’s heart is beating fast. He checks the flat twice, goes in and out of the tiny rooms, locks all the windows and slides both the bolts across the door. He’ll call the locksmith first thing in the morning.
‘We need to work out who would do this,’ he says. He is finding it increasingly hard to think straight, the combination of the Peroni and now this is making his head feel painful.
There is a space in the knife block. One of the set is definitely missing. They had a set from his mother, she’d given them a load of kitchen stuff when they first moved into the flat. He opens the cutlery drawer, searches through it just in case. It is definitely not there.
He swallows, looks at the body of the doll. It stares back at him blankly. ‘We need to call the police.’
Corinne is holding his hands tightly. ‘I’m really scared, Dominic. I don’t want to stay here tonight.’
He looks at her. Her eyes are huge in her face; she looks like a hunted animal.
‘We can’t go anywhere tonight,’ he tells her. ‘It’s gone midnight. We’ll get the locksmith out first thing in the morning, and we’ll work out what to do. Whoever it was has gone, they’re not here.’
‘Please, Dominic,’ she says. ‘Please don’t make us stay here tonight. They might come back.’
He sighs, runs a hand through his hair. Maybe she is right. There is a Travelodge on Gray’s Inn Road. Perhaps they should go there.
‘All right,’ he says. ‘All right. Grab some things and we’ll get a taxi to somewhere cheap for the night. I can’t drive, I’ve had too much to drink.’
Corinne goes into the bedroom. He hears her scrabbling around, the thud of the wardrobe door as she gets her overnight bag out. Beatrice lies on the table; he can see the wood of the surface through the hole in her stomach. Dominic shivers, and picks up the phone. His fingers dial the three digits: nine, nine, nine. His eyes dart around the flat as he listens to the voice on the end.
Then
I can feel myself becoming less and less patient. At night my apartment gets too hot – I push back the sheets, scratch at my chest. It feels as though bugs are crawling across my skin, nipping at me, reminding me that time is running out. Slipping away. I pick up my mobile, think about calling his phone. That would get her thinking, wouldn’t it? But I make myself stop, put the phone down on the table, stare at it until the green light goes off. I lie back down, stare up at the ceiling. I think about being in the garden, wriggling through the fence, wanting to press my face against the window and merge through the glass. I imagine my body pushing through into their living room, the windows shattering around me, cutting my limbs and my flesh like hundreds of tiny knives.
I wish I could sleep, let my body relax. I’d have a drink to take the edge off but I don’t drink much any more. When I was at school, some of the older kids used to make me – they’d pass me the vodka bottle, watch as my lips unpursed and the liquid wriggled down my throat. I didn’t like it. That’s what she reminded me of the other night, all big eyes and weak stomach. Her hair was all over the place. She couldn’t even walk in her heels. I took a photograph, thought I might upload it to her Instagram account. It made me laugh a little bit, then I panicked and pressed delete. I can’t mess this up.
I’m at my best when I’m planning, when I’m thinking of ideas. Mum is too, now that she’s busy her voice is brighter when we speak. Some of the ideas work, and some of them don’t. My best ideas come when I’ve had a good long session of remembering – remembering how bad I used to feel, the splash of the cold water in our old flat, the sour smell of Mummy when she hadn’t washed. The way the kids at school looked at me. The way the grass felt against my knees in their garden. The day we got to go inside. That day really got to me, I think. It changed things. It made me see how big the difference was, between what I had and what I deserved.
I put my hand into the child’s high chair yesterday, felt the hot sweaty flesh of its fingers. One of them curled around mine and I jumped backwards, felt my breath catch in my throat.
‘Let go,’ I said, but it just clung tighter, and its eyes stared up into mine like it really liked me. Trusted me. That child really shouldn’t do that.
44
London
Corinne
The police are here. They take a horribly long time to arrive and we have to wait in the flat, listen to the ticking of the clock. At last two men appear at the door, one of them in his early forties, the other looks barely older than Lucy. He has a twisted cauliflower ear; I can’t stop looking at it, at how ugly it is.
‘So, do you want to run us through what happened, Mr and Mrs Stones?’ the elder one says. ‘I understand there’s been a break-in?’
‘We’re not married,’ I say then, and a look of hurt flashes across Dominic’s face. I reach for his hand, feeling instantly ashamed; we aren’t married because we can’t afford it. I don’t know why I felt the need to say that. I suppose I feel cross with him, cross that he wasn’t here tonight, that he was out with Andy while I was going through the horror of finding Beatrice all on my own. Cross with him for not changing the locks when I wanted him to. Cross with him for only now starting to take me seriously when I’ve been trying to get through to him for weeks.
‘I came home,’ I say, my voice shaking a little, ‘I was go
ing to make dinner, I was just about to – to chop a pepper and – and I found her. I found Beatrice, that’s the doll. –’ I gesture stupidly at her ruined body on the table between us. ‘She was in the sink, with a hole in her stomach. My knife is missing, our big kitchen knife. I think they used it to cut her open.’
The younger policeman is staring at the doll, a look of revulsion on his face. I feel impatient. That isn’t going to help now.
‘And where were you at this time?’ the elder policeman asks Dominic, his pen poised in the air.
There’s a tiny pause.
‘I was out,’ Dom says, ‘I was with a colleague in a bar. Just an after-work drink.’
The man nods. ‘Someone can vouch for that?’
I frown. Where is he going with this?
‘He was with Andy,’ I say. ‘He’s his friend from the paper, yes, he’ll vouch for it. That isn’t the point here. Someone’s been in the flat,’ I say, my voice rising. I can feel panic building in my chest.
Dom squeezes my hand gently but I ignore him, carry on speaking. ‘I don’t know how they got in, nothing’s broken, nothing’s been moved. Just this, just Beatrice.’
The older policeman is taking notes, his pen moving swiftly across the page.
‘And you say one of your knives has gone?’ He directs the question at Dominic, not me. He thinks I sound hysterical, I can tell.
‘Yes,’ I interrupt. ‘The big silver one, it’s gone, it’s definitely missing. I’m telling you, someone is using this as a threat. This is my doll, she belongs to me.’
I want to cry. The horror of it all is sinking in, the air in the flat feels tight and oppressive. Dom’s eyes are slightly bloodshot, as though he’s had too much to drink. I feel like screaming the place down.
The Doll House Page 24