by Mark Edwards
‘So,’ Nina said, pulling into the car park, ‘do you want to tell me? It’s not tiredness, is it? And if it’s not nerves . . .’
Isabel sipped her drink. It burned her tongue.
‘Do you promise this is between you and me? No matter what I tell you?’
‘You haven’t murdered someone, have you?’
‘Ha! I’ve only thought about it . . . But seriously, do you promise?’
‘Okay.’
Isabel took a deep breath.
‘I think Darpak is cheating on me.’ She exhaled. She felt a tiny bit better now the words were out there in the world.
‘What? This is a joke, right?’
‘No, Nina. It’s not a joke. I found a picture on his phone. A woman sent him a photo of her tits with the message To keep you going till next time. And four kisses. Let’s not forget the four kisses.’
Nina gawped at her. ‘What woman?’
‘I don’t know her name. Stupidly, because I was so shocked, I didn’t note down the number. And her face wasn’t visible. He’s deleted it since.’
‘Does he know you saw it?’
‘No. I don’t think so, anyway.’
‘You haven’t spoken to him about it? Why not?’
‘Because . . . I’m scared. Scared of what it will lead to. Divorce. Loads of messy shit around the business. And what if I give him an ultimatum, me or her, and he chooses her? Maybe if I leave it, pretend I don’t know, it will burn itself out.’
Nina had been holding her coffee cup throughout this conversation without taking a sip. ‘If he was having an affair, would you want to stay with him?’
‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’ Isabel smiled humourlessly. ‘But I’d like to be the one to decide.’
Nina finally took a sip of her coffee. ‘I just can’t see it. He adores you. It must be a mistake . . . A prank or something, one of his mates messing around. Or some woman who’s into him, trying to come on to him. Did you see any messages from him to her?’
‘No.’
‘Then I bet that’s it. Some slut trying to lead him astray.’
Isabel cringed. She hated that word. But she couldn’t deny it had gone through her head numerous times recently, adding to her self-loathing, making her hate Darpak because it was his fault she was thinking it.
‘The message said Till next time. Not All this could be yours.’
‘I know. But . . . he loves you, Isabel. You’re amazing. Beautiful and successful and . . . an expert in the thing men are most interested in.’
‘Female pleasure?’ Isabel said, deadpan.
That made Nina laugh. ‘I meant sex. But I get your point.’
Isabel laughed too. ‘The thing is, and I know you don’t want to hear about your brother’s sex life, the last few months it’s like he’s completely lost interest. He never comes near me. Don’t pull that face – you did make me tell you what was wrong.’
Nina shook her head. ‘I find that hard to believe too. That he’d lose interest in you.’
‘You’ve never been married. Most people go through dry patches. If it was only that, I wouldn’t be too worried. I admit I haven’t been that amorous lately either. Christ, I spend my days teaching other people about sex. Doing it myself is almost like a busman’s holiday. Maybe Darpak got sick of me telling him I was tired.’
‘That’s not an excuse, though.’
‘I know it’s not! If he’s met someone he can’t resist, a woman who inspires him and makes him feel love and excitement and passion, that’s one thing. If he’s gone off looking elsewhere because he wasn’t getting enough at home, because his wife didn’t understand him . . .’ She didn’t need to complete the sentence. ‘It’s made me wonder about our whole relationship. Could a slowdown between the sheets really send him straight off into the arms of another woman? Could it make him stop loving me?’
Nina didn’t know the answers. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘What do you think I should do?’
‘Oh God. If I was married and my husband was cheating on me, I wouldn’t be able to hold back. I’d have to confront him. And I wouldn’t want to be with him any more, even if it was messy and painful. But I think there’s a very good chance he’s innocent. None of what you’re saying makes sense. He still talks about you as if he worships you.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. He was talking to me last week about what to get you for Christmas. I think you should speak to him. Tell him you saw something that made you worry, and see what his reaction is. I think you’ll know if he’s lying. Imagine how good you’ll feel if you realise you’ve been fretting about nothing.’
‘You’re right. I have to do it. Rip off the Band-Aid.’ She yawned. ‘Sorry. I haven’t slept properly all week.’
Nina reached over to the back seat for her bag. She took out a little brown bottle of tablets. ‘Here, take this.’
‘What is it?’
‘Zopiclone. The doctor prescribed it earlier this year when I was having trouble sleeping. I stopped after a few days because I didn’t like it. Maybe it will help you, though.’
Isabel hesitated, then slipped the little bottle into her own bag. ‘Thanks. Maybe I’ll just take one tonight. I just need one good night’s sleep.’
‘Exactly.’ Nina gripped her hand. ‘You’re a strong, amazing woman, Izzy. You’re not the type to let a man screw you around.’
‘Huh. Maybe.’
‘And one more thing. If my brother is cheating on you, I’ll bloody kill him.’
Isabel forced a smile. ‘Thanks. Now, come on. We need to go and talk to a man about lube.’
Chapter 20
Jessica was woken by her phone vibrating on the bedside table and was shocked to see it was ten in the morning.
‘What’s going on?’ Will asked as soon as she picked up. ‘I’ve been trying to call you for the past hour.’
She sat up. Olivia was still asleep beside her, the quilt pulled over the bottom half of her face. Angelic.
Memories of everything that had happened during the night rushed in. The eyeless toys. The car outside. I drawed it.
‘I had a bad night, okay?’ she said. ‘We were having a lie-in.’
‘Oh. Are you both okay?’
‘I’ll . . . explain later. Can I talk to Felix?’
She had a quick chat with Felix, wishing him luck in the tournament, then went downstairs in search of caffeine.
Wrapped in her dressing gown, she went out into the garden with Caspar, coffee steaming in the cold morning air. She opened the gate and peered out. No sign of the grey Hyundai, not that she’d expected there to be. She went back inside and up to Olivia’s room, where she gathered the mutilated toys and put them away in a cupboard. In daylight they looked sad rather than scary. She also doubted her ability to fix them. She could take them to a professional, but it would probably be cheaper to buy replacements.
She woke Olivia and told her to come downstairs. Olivia rubbed her eyes, but sprang to life in that way small children do, as if a switch flicks and they’re on, wide awake and ready for the day.
Back in the kitchen she made boiled eggs and soldiers.
‘Sweetheart,’ she said, as Olivia dipped a soldier into her egg, ‘do you remember what we talked about last night?’
A frown. ‘No.’
‘You said that Izzy told you a secret.’
Olivia stuffed toast into her mouth so she wouldn’t have to speak. She looked like a hamster, cheeks bulging.
‘You said that you drew the secret.’
Silence. Olivia chewed slowly and swallowed. Perhaps realising that her mum wasn’t going to give up, she nodded.
‘Where’s the drawing, Livvy?’
Olivia threw her head back and huffed like this was the most tedious, stupid question ever. ‘It’s a secret, Mummy.’
But her reticence probably didn’t matter. Because halfway through the conversation Jessica remembered something. She was su
re she knew where the drawing was.
‘This is a surprise,’ Mum said, opening the front door to find Jessica and Olivia, both wrapped in their winter gear, Caspar beside them, tail wagging at the sight of one of his favourite people.
‘Hello, boy!’ Mum bent to ruffle the dog’s fur and he pushed his face against her legs.
‘Mummy said we could take Caspar for a walk,’ Olivia said as they went into the house. It was warm and smelled of fried bacon. ‘Me and you and Pete.’
‘Oh, did she?’
Jessica smiled and held up her laptop. ‘I’ve got some work to catch up with, Will’s on the Isle of Wight and I thought you and Pete might appreciate the exercise.’
‘Sounds like a great idea to me,’ Pete said, coming out of the kitchen. He had a smear of ketchup on his cheek. ‘Although your mother and I expended a lot of energy last night.’
‘Dancing!’ Mum interjected hurriedly.
Pete winked at Jessica. ‘Oh yes. That as well.’
Mum tutted. ‘Dreadful news about Pat Shelton, wasn’t it? That’s why I’m glad I moved into this place.’
‘Did you know her?’ Jessica asked. It had been all over the local paper the last few days. The police weren’t treating it as a suspicious death, just a tragic accident.
‘Of course! She used to work at William Peacocke. She was a dinner lady when you and Izzy were there. Oh, goodness – did you hear about the fire last night? It’s all happening around here, isn’t it? Thank God nobody was in the building.’
Jessica didn’t want to think about the fire right now.
‘I thought Pat had always been at Foxgrove.’
Mum shook her head. ‘No, she was definitely at Peacocke for a while. She probably worked at a few other places too.’
Jessica had forgotten that. As a child, most of the dinner ladies had been interchangeable.
‘Poor old thing,’ Mum said. ‘Pete knew her too.’
‘That’s right,’ he said, searching for his coat. ‘She used to come to the RAFA occasionally.’
Jessica wasn’t surprised that Mum and Pete had known Pat. Mum knew everyone in Beckenham. Walking down the high street with her was a nightmare; she stopped every two minutes to chat to someone.
‘Come on, then,’ Mum said, patting the dog. ‘Want to go walkies, Caspar?’
As soon as the house was empty Jessica hurried into the living room. Now, where would Mum have put Olivia’s new drawing book, the one Olivia wouldn’t let her look at the other day? It wasn’t in the box of toys or on the coffee table where Mum had a stack of that week’s real-life magazines. She went into the kitchen but there was no sign of it there either.
She was sure it wouldn’t be in Mum’s bedroom, which left the spare room. This was where Olivia and Felix slept on the rare occasions when Mum looked after them for the night. There was another box of toys in here, along with a shelf full of old children’s books that used to belong to Jessica and Izzy. Roald Dahl and the Wombles and a few novels they’d read as young teenagers. John Wyndham’s Chocky and The Midwich Cuckoos, plus a creepy book called The Midnight House, which they’d read to each other under the covers.
Not spotting the drawing book straight away, Jessica picked up The Midnight House. Opening it, she was thrown back in time and across town, to their old house, their childhood bedroom.
They huddled together beneath the covers on the bottom bunk, using the torch Izzy had sneaked out of the downstairs cupboard.
Izzy held the book, reading the final words of a chapter near the end of the book. ‘Sally crept up the stairs, her heart pounding beneath her nightdress. She was sure the noise had come from Father’s study. But it was impossible! No one had been in the study since Father died . . .’
Jess squealed and put the pillow over her face. ‘I don’t want to hear any more. It’s too scary!’
But Izzy ignored her, pulling the pillow away and reading on. In the book, Sally tried the door to her dead dad’s study and, to her amazement, the handle turned and the door opened.
‘If it were possible to die of fright, Sally would have expired right there on the spot. But her heart kept on beating, faster and harder than ever, as she took in the state of the room.’
‘Please, stop,’ Jess begged.
‘Drawers had been yanked open, some of them hanging at crooked angles. Papers were scattered everywhere. The paperweight Sally had loved to play with as a small child lay on the floor, a crack snaking across its hard glass surface, like it had been hurled there with enormous force.’
‘Oh God, Izzy! Don’t!’
‘In the middle of the desk stood Father’s old typewriter, on which he had written all his Important Letters. A single sheet of paper had been inserted into it and, as Sally crept closer, she saw three words typed there in block capitals.’
Izzy paused.
‘What did it say?’ Jess half-shouted, trying to grab the book from Izzy, who giggled as she held it out of Jess’s reach.
‘Patience, sister.’
‘Tell me!’
‘Okay.’ She read on, repeating the previous line. ‘. . . Sally saw three words typed there in block capitals: DON’T TRUST MOTHER.’
Jessica gasped with horror.
Now, twenty-five years later, Jessica laughed as she snapped the book shut. As far as she remembered, it turned out that Sally’s mother had killed her father and intended to kill her too. But Sally’s dad’s ghost came back and saved her.
She was amazed Mum had let them read that book, what with everything that had been going on . . . No, actually, that wasn’t right. They had read that book before all the strange occurrences started. Dad had still been around. Larry hadn’t made his first appearance till around six months after they’d read the book.
But before she could think about this any more, and work out if it meant anything, she spotted Olivia’s drawing book. It was on one of the spare beds, half-covered by a blanket.
She sat on the bed and paused before opening the book, unsure of what she’d find. The secret. She leafed through childish sketches of dogs and houses, flowers and people who were drawn in Olivia’s current style: elongated bodies, long stretchy limbs, like daddy-long-legs with faces. In Olivia’s pictures everyone was smiling and the sun was always shining. There was no sign here, in these pictures, of Olivia’s so-called obsession with death. There wasn’t even a flicker of interest in the subject. No pictures of bodies. No blood, no gravestones, no ghosts.
She reached a blank page and stopped. She leafed back, studied the drawings again. If Izzy had told Olivia a secret, it was supremely benign. She stopped and laughed at herself. Of course Izzy hadn’t told Olivia a secret, because ghosts weren’t real. Olivia had imagined her deceased aunt telling her something. That was why Jessica was here. She wanted to know what was going on in Olivia’s head, hoping it would give her some clue, an idea of what do about it.
Except . . . except that wasn’t entirely true, was it? Because in the dead of night, when Olivia had told her about the secret, Jessica had believed. She had been as credulous as she was when she was a little girl, when she saw all those broken plates and smashed picture frames as evidence that their poltergeist was real. In a way, it was easier to believe. Lying in bed, listening to Olivia talk about secrets and explaining why she had cut out her toys’ eyes, it was easier to believe a ghost told her to do it. There was no confusion that way. Superstition was simpler than science. Why spend years looking for evidence of how the universe was created when it was right there in the Bible? God did it.
A ghost did it.
Except, according to the evidence here in this sketch pad, Izzy’s ghost hadn’t told Olivia to do anything. There was nothing to see.
Jessica ran a hand across her forehead. She was so tired. The painkillers she’d taken had dulled her headache but it was still there, and she found herself reluctant to set the sketch pad aside. Because no matter how hard she tried to rationalise everything, she didn’t believe Olivia had been
making it up when she said, ‘I drawed it.’
She must be missing something.
She turned to the last drawing, turned over to the blank page and kept going. Because if you were going to draw a secret, you’d hide it, wouldn’t you? Hide it within the empty pages, where no grown-up would think to look.
She found the drawing halfway through the book.
On the left half was a house. A square with a triangle for a roof, four windows and a door. The kind of house Olivia always drew. But protruding from the upper right-hand side of this house was another, much smaller square.
A balcony.
And beneath the balcony lay a figure. One of Olivia’s stretched-out people. It had long yellow hair and eyelashes. There was a scribble of red next to her.
Here it was: the dead body and blood that had been absent from all the other pictures.
Jessica turned the page and found herself looking at an almost identical drawing. Except this one had an extra detail. The scale was wrong; the balcony was bigger, almost a third the size of the house. Olivia had drawn it big so she could add another figure, standing in the box, a curling smile on his face.
A man.
Jessica stared at the drawing. What had Olivia said on Bonfire Night? You can’t fall. You have to be pushed.
Pushed by a man. A bad man.
No matter how much Jessica told herself it was impossible, that Olivia couldn’t possibly know anything, the doubt was creeping in. Not just creeping in but swirling, shouting, overriding logic. Olivia knew the truth. Izzy, desperate for justice, had come back and spoken to her niece, told her what had happened. It wasn’t just a little girl’s imagination – because Olivia knew things she couldn’t have imagined. The song and the name of the cat. And not just that. Because it struck Jessica now that, as far as she knew, no one had ever told Olivia that Isabel had died falling from that balcony.
Jessica sat there for a long time, until she heard the others come back. As the front door slammed and Pete called out, ‘Cup of tea?’, Jessica got up and went into the hall. Olivia had gone into the living room to find her toys. Mum, who was taking off her coat and boots, turned when she heard Jessica behind her.