by Lucy Atkins
‘The preliminary research I’ve done. I mentioned it to you in France. The Venus of Broadmoor? Christiana Edmunds? Obviously France wasn’t the right time to talk about it but now that everything’s settled and Annabel’s such a hit, it’s surely time start our next book.’
She gulps. Perhaps a piece of pigeon is stuck in her throat, though I didn’t see her put anything into her mouth. She puts a hand to her neck.
I get up and hobble to the sink to get her a glass of water, trying to ignore the pain in my knee. ‘I’m assuming Joy wants a follow-up as fast as possible, to capitalize on the success of Annabel,’ I say as I turn the tap on. ‘Number two on the bestseller chart in its first week. That’s very good indeed, isn’t it? I expect people are already asking about your next book?’
She is still struggling. Her eyes have gone watery, her cheeks very red. I wonder if I should hop across the kitchen and slap her between the shoulder blades. I try not to spill any water as I come back to the table, but it sloshes on the floor. I don’t look at the plates. It is too late to think about peas.
She grabs the glass from me and gulps at it, staring at me over the rim.
I sit down, sticking my leg out, and pick up my knife and fork again. ‘When we’ve finished eating, I’ll make a pot of coffee and we can take it to the library. Are you still very cold? It is cold in here, isn’t it? I think the heating’s on the blink but I can try to fix it. I can always light a fire in the library too. We can take our coffee in there and put our heads together about the Chocolate Cream Poisoner.’ I look up at a spot on the wall just above her head, a little stain. ‘It’ll be quite cosy in there.’
I can feel that her eyes are fixed on my face.
‘Of course, if you’re too tired to talk about it tonight you could always stay over – there’s plenty of room, as you know. You could sleep in Lady Burley’s room. You must be exhausted after the party last night. I know things have been difficult for you lately at home too …’ I nod at her ring finger. ‘But you can stay as long as you like. You could have a nice rest here.’ I do look at her then. Her eyelids flutter. ‘Eat up now.’ I point at her half-eaten pigeon breast. ‘You’ve lost weight. It’s important to eat.’
Slowly, she lifts a morsel to her lips. Her eyes are still fixed, blackly, on me. I look down at my empty plate. ‘There.’ I nod, encouragingly. ‘That’s right. Good girl. Eat up.’
She stares back at me. She doesn’t put the pigeon piece into her mouth.
Olivia
Ileford Manor
There was no way Olivia could stomach anything that Vivian had cooked. Even if she’d wanted to force it down she would have choked. Vivian hauled herself up and limped to the sink carrying the plates. Olivia watched her but did not move. It was bitterly cold in the room. She felt sick. Her head hurt. Everything hurt.
She watched Vivian’s cropped, grey-flecked head bend over the washing-up basin, watched as she tipped the uneaten pigeon into the compost bin and washed, rinsed and stacked each plate on the drainer, then the knives and then the forks. She refilled the basin with clean, soapy water and washed the glasses separately, rinsing each one methodically under the tap. Then she wiped her hands on the royal wedding tea towel and turned around.
‘It really is terribly cold in here.’ Vivian’s voice was deep and too loud. ‘Why don’t you make the coffee while I go down and see to the heating? The boiler’s old and rather temperamental, but I can generally fix it myself. The real coffee’s in the blue china pot above the kettle and there’s one of those cafetière things on the shelf above it. I won’t be a moment.’
Olivia nodded, but didn’t move.
Vivian limped past her and out of the kitchen.
For a moment or two she just stared at the empty space by the sink where Vivian had been. This was her future. If she ever tried to get away, Vivian would expose her and take her down. She had the power to ruin what was left of her life. And she knew that dogged, fixated mind so well. This was it, forever. Vivian would never let her go.
She didn’t go and turn the kettle on. The pressure inside her head felt overwhelming. After a minute or two she got up and went into the corridor. The air was icy. She could hear the wind bumping against the windows in the great hall. The door down to the cellars where Uncle Quentin once kept a savage bear was open. She could hear Vivian’s uneven step coming back along the stone floor down below.
She peered down the steep concrete stairs. There was a banister on one side only, a sheer drop to flagstones on the other. The colourless strip lights flickered. She could make out vaulted ceilings. This would have been where the kitchens were originally, stretching along the bowels of the house. She could smell cloying dampness, a sinister, neglected stench. The top of Vivian’s head came into view. The overhead light picked out each coarse, cropped, silvery strand.
Vivian looked up, startled. ‘Oh, Olivia, there you are! Good news. I think I’ve fixed it. It works most of the time, but I must get a heating engineer out. Did you make the coffee already?’
Olivia said nothing. She could not speak.
Vivian grasped the banister with her left hand and began to climb the steps. Her knee was clearly badly damaged. She had to swing her whole leg sideways from the hip onto each step because she couldn’t bend it. This lurching made her very unstable. Olivia stood motionless at the top of the stairs, watching her.
Vivian was almost at the top now; just a few more steps and they would be level again. Her square face still had a confused look – her eyes were bright and anxious. ‘Olivia?’ she said. ‘What’s the matter? Is everything all right?’
Everything went very quiet and still inside Olivia’s head.
Vivian’s foot slipped as it swung up to the next step – perhaps her slipper caught the edge – and her free arm flew up in an attempt to rebalance her body. Her hand grasped at the air and for a second it was right there, right in front of Olivia’s nose, patting at the space between them, desperately looking for something to hold on to, some kind of help as the hand on the banister started to slip. Olivia stepped forwards. She felt Vivian’s rough wool cardigan under her fingertips and then there was a sort of chaotic toppling as Vivian’s body went sideways, her free arm swung and her other hand was ripped off the banister. That, too, briefly opened and closed in front of Olivia’s face, clasping at air.
The noise Vivian’s body made as she hit the flagstones was surprisingly muted. Her head bounced off them a few times and then went still.
Perhaps it was the padding of her cardigan and slacks, or perhaps Olivia’s senses were so detached that she couldn’t absorb sounds, couldn’t process the reality of this dense object hitting a stone floor.
After what could have been moments or minutes she walked down the stairs to where Vivian was lying. Her body looked all wrong.
Olivia’s legs were shaking so much that she couldn’t hold herself up. She fell to her knees by Vivian’s head. The small round eyes stared up at the ceiling. One sclera held a little bloodshot map, the other a pool, perhaps a tear. There was a mess beneath her head, too, something sticky and oozing, and an odd, sickening, ferrous smell.
‘Vivian?’ Her voice echoed off the vaulted cellar ceilings. ‘Vivian, can you hear me?’ She bent down so that her face was right next to Vivian’s mouth. ‘Vivian!’ She waited to feel a breath on her cheek. But there was no breath.
Olivia
Ileford Manor
Olivia sat at the kitchen table. Her hands were still trembling but she couldn’t feel them. It was as if they belonged to someone else. Her body felt entirely numb. She’d tried to tell the detective sergeant everything in as logical a way as possible. She wondered if her self-control might seem odd. She thought perhaps it would be better if she cried. But she couldn’t seem to summon any tears.
The two detectives sat side by side, opposite her, at the kitchen table. The younger man, the detective constable, maintained a pleasant and non-committal look, while the more senior officer, a woman about her own age
with prominent eye-bags and a faint Birmingham accent, asked the same questions that the uniformed officer had asked just a few minutes before. She wasn’t sure why she had to repeat things. Maybe they always did this, checking answers off against each other. But she couldn’t sit here and answer repetitive questions all night. She needed to leave Ileford. She had to get out of this house and never come back.
They were both friendly, clearly trying to reassure her or calm her down. The detective sergeant said she recognized Olivia from the TV. She’d seen her on Would I Lie to You? and heard her on the radio. It felt ludicrous to be making small talk at a time like this, but Olivia assumed that she was only trying to get her past the horror of what had just happened.
The constable didn’t look much older than Dom. Poor Dom. She had to talk to Dom. She couldn’t just sit here. She needed to get back to London to the children. David wouldn’t have told them what he’d done. She needed to be there for them. And she needed to look David in the eye and tell him that their marriage was over. Everything was such a mess. She shouldn’t be here, she should be there, with the children. She felt tears coming. Then she started shaking.
‘It’s OK, it’s a shock, here …’ The more senior detective pushed a packet of tissues across the table and the constable asked if he could get her another blanket. She shook her head.
She didn’t even know why the detectives were here. The ambulance had been the first to arrive, lights flashing on the driveway, and two paramedics had rushed down to Vivian and started doing things to her body – she hadn’t watched – and then she’d heard another car in the driveway. Two uniformed patrol officers came through the open front door, giants in bulky black stab vests with radios crackling at their shoulders. One had gone straight down to the basement, where the paramedics were still doing things, while the other had asked her name, what had happened and whether there was anyone else in the house.
She’d tried to explain to him about Vivian’s knee, that she slipped and fell. As she was talking she’d heard a paramedic at the bottom of the cellar steps say, ‘Life extinct 6.23 p.m.’ That word, extinct, felt brutal. She’d heard herself let out an odd, strangled noise. The police officer asked, then, if she’d moved Vivian at all – she said no – and then another car drew up outside the house and moments later this detective sergeant and her constable had come through the front door.
She didn’t know whether all this was normal procedure. Maybe this many people always arrived after a 999 call if someone died. The paramedic had said to the detectives, ‘The main injury’s a head trauma.’
She wondered if she’d heard a note of suspicion in his tone, a question mark in there somewhere. She wasn’t sure. Perhaps she’d somehow given the ambulance dispatcher the sense that this was something other than an accident. When the voice on the other end of the line had asked what happened, Olivia remembered a stabbing guilt, a paralysis, when she had been unable to answer. Eventually she said, ‘My friend slipped and she’s not moving. I think she’s not breathing. She has a bad knee – she couldn’t bend her leg and she just … she fell.’ She wondered whether that pause was why the dispatcher became suspicious and sent not just an ambulance, but a patrol car, and then two detectives.
‘So …’ The detective sergeant looked down at her notebook. ‘Miss Tester, Vivian, she was your friend?’
Olivia tried to think. ‘No. Not really. It was a professional relationship. She’d been – we’d – she’d given me some background materials when I was writing my book. My subject, Annabel Burley, lived in this house. Annabel’s diary – the Victorian diary that my book is based on – was found here, among the Burley family papers.’ She swallowed again. She felt as if there was something lodged in her throat.
‘I see. So Vivian gave you permission to write about Annabel’s diary?’
‘Yes. Well, she got permission from Lady Burley for me to study it and other Burley family archive materials.’
‘And you said Lady Burley’s in a care home?’
Olivia nodded. ‘Three Elms House.’ She gave the name of the village but the detectives didn’t write it down, they obviously knew where it was.
‘All right, Professor Sweetman, if you can bear with me, I know this is hard, but I just want to be really clear about what happened tonight. You said the two of you went for a walk in the woods and then Vivian cooked you pigeon breasts at about …’ She glanced at her notes. ‘Five thirty – which you both ate – and then she went down to fix the central heating and she fell coming back up?’
‘Yes. She had a bad knee. She twisted it, I think, when we went for our walk, she stumbled in the woods, she was limping a lot, but it had been stiff for a while, I think. I think she probably needed a knee replacement … I went to see if she needed help and I heard her falling as … as she came back up the cellar steps.’
‘You heard her fall? A moment ago you said you saw her fall. Did you see or hear the fall?’
‘I don’t know.’ Olivia felt tears coming again. ‘Both? I think. I’m sorry.’ She wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands and swallowed. ‘I just … It’s quite hard to take in. I can’t believe this has happened.’
‘I know. You just take your time, you’re doing really well. A shock like this is hard to handle. Now, did you actually see her fall?’
‘I don’t know, I sort of did. It’s difficult to … the lighting isn’t great. She’d asked me to make the coffee and I was just coming to the top of the stairs as she was coming up. She slipped – her foot definitely slipped – and she sort of fell sideways and backwards.’
‘So you did see her foot slip?’
‘Yes, maybe, but it all happened incredibly fast. I … I think I reached out for her …’ She felt her throat constrict. She took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not being very clear, am I?
‘Don’t worry. You’re doing just fine.’ The detective nodded and wrote something down.
‘So you didn’t go down to help her with the boiler?’ the constable asked.
‘Well, no. I was making the coffee. She asked me to make coffee. I didn’t know the basement steps were so dangerous. She’s never shown me the basement steps. I haven’t been in this house very much. I … We had a professional relationship. She was a very private person.’
The senior detective nodded and handed her another tissue.
She wiped under her eyes, leaving black smears on it. She knew she must look a mess. ‘I was just popping in today to thank her really. It was my book launch party last night. I’m sorry. I’m really tired, I’m a bit …’
Olivia suddenly couldn’t stop crying. She felt snot pouring out of her nose and heard herself making strangulated noises.
‘It’s all right.’ The detective sergeant sounded quite maternal. ‘You have a good cry. Take your time now. It’s OK. No rush. Let’s get you a cup of tea.’ She looked at the constable. After a beat, he got up and went over to the kettle.
Olivia wiped at her eyes and nose again. ‘I should have gone down to fix the boiler myself.’
‘Do you know how to fix the heating in this house?’
‘No.’
‘Well then.’
‘But I should have gone with her at least, you’re right, she was limping quite badly.’
The woman glanced around the kitchen. Her eyes rested on the wall calendar for a moment. ‘Why is Lady Burley in a home?’
‘She’s elderly and she has cancer, maybe dementia too, I’m not sure. This will be awful for her … Oh God. She’s very fond of Vivian.’
‘Don’t worry. We’ll go and see her next. You have a house near here, you said?’
Olivia wiped her nose and eyes and shook her head. ‘Yes, but I live in London. I need to go home now, back to London. I need to see my children.’
The detective nodded. ‘Of course you do. We’ll just need you to come in and make a statement though.’
‘A statement?’ She looked from one detective to the other.
‘It’s ju
st routine,’ the young man said, plugging the kettle in.
Olivia nodded.
‘It might not be a good idea to drive yourself, you’ve had quite a shock,’ the senior detective said. ‘Is there anyone you want with you?’
She couldn’t think of anyone who could come down from London. Clearly not David. And Chloe was away today, it was her mother’s birthday. She thought of Emma. Her anxious, panicky response to this wouldn’t be good, but her legal expertise might be reassuring. ‘Maybe I could call my friend …’
‘Yes, good idea. Go ahead.’
Olivia pulled out her mobile, ignoring the missed calls from David, and called Emma’s number. Emma didn’t pick up. She left a message and then tried Khalil, but he didn’t pick up either.
‘Not in?’
She shook her head. She couldn’t think of anyone else she could ask to drive all the way down to Sussex to get her. She could probably try Joy or Carol but she wouldn’t want either of them to see her like this. She straightened her spine. ‘Honestly, I’ll be fine in a minute, I really will. I just need to get back to London as soon as … as this is … My children are there and I really need to get back to them.’
‘Is your husband around?’
‘Yes, he’s there – he’s with them now, but he has to go away.’
She saw the detective glance at her ring finger.
‘I really need to get back to London.’
‘Of course you do. But don’t worry about your children. If your husband has to go, then we can arrange for someone to go to your house in London and look after them while you come with us.’ Her voice was reassuring but there was a hint of rigidity behind her words. Olivia felt as if invisible doors were slamming shut around her.
She needed to get away from this table, from these two detectives and their intent eyes. ‘Do you mind if I just … I need to go to the loo,’ she said.
‘Of course,’ they said, in unison.
She got up, unsteadily, and walked out of the kitchen. She could feel them both there, watching her. As she turned into the corridor she heard the younger detective say something in a low voice, though she couldn’t hear what. She paused in the hallway, pressed her back against the wall, and listened. The female detective said, ‘There’s no sign of anyone making coffee in here, is there? You know, I’ve got a funny feeling about this one. That’s not just shock. Something’s definitely off. I’m going to call in the circus. I’ll go and have a word with the paramedics, then take a quick look around. You stay here with her. Make her drink that tea, we don’t want her collapsing on us.’