by Lisa Jewell
There was a necklace the next day, with a simple diamond pendant.
She knows nothing of his childhood, of his past. She knows nothing of his scars. But she knows they are there.
It’s sunny as they pull off the main road towards the town called Ridinghouse Bay. But it’s cosy in here, the radio tuned into something easy listening, the heater breathing out warm air. And Russ is very good company. Lily feels relaxed with him, as if she can say anything. On the next bend the town comes into view: a C-shaped jumble of tiny houses spilling down towards the sea, small boats bobbing about in the sparkling harbour. But they turn away from the town and down a shadowy road where bowers of darkly nodding trees meet overhead like a corridor.
The lady on Google Maps says: ‘In fifty yards, on your left, you have reached your destination.’
Lily feels nervous now. She grasps Russ’s sleeve and says, ‘I’m scared.’
‘It’s going to be fine,’ he says. ‘Chances are there’ll be no one here. Chances are we’ll be turning straight round and going home again.’
‘I am scared of that, too.’
They pull off the road and have to stop because there is a rusty chain across the driveway. Lily jumps out of the car and unclips the chain, pulls it across and stands back to let Russ bring the car on to the driveway. She has never seen such a beautiful house. It is built from a cream-coloured stone, or maybe it has been painted cream. There are gargoyles and busts built into the plasterwork, fluted columns and a set of smile-shaped stone steps leading up to a huge black wooden door with a brass knocker at its centre. Behind the house is the sea and a royal-blue sky full of pale-gold puffs of cloud.
She goes to the door of Russ’s car and waits for him to get out.
‘This house is very beautiful,’ she says. ‘I have never seen a house like this before.’
‘Georgian,’ says Russ, brushing sandwich crumbs from his lap and stretching out his arms. ‘Or maybe neo-Georgian. Looks a bit neglected.’
She follows him towards the front door, her heart thumping hard, the carrier bag with the photo album in it clutched tight in her hand. There is no sign of life and now that they are closer to the house Lily can see that the building is tired and scruffy, that the cream walls and the windows are dirty, that the rose beds outside the front windows are overgrown and filled with dead leaves.
It is not a fairy-tale palace after all. But still, it is a fine house. She cannot imagine why Carl would not have wanted to bring her here. To share this with her.
She rings the doorbell and it chimes, just as she had imagined it would, with the elegant sound of copper tubes. No one comes. No lights go on. No voice calls out. Russ rings it again. He looks at her and frowns, then rings again. They try for five minutes, until it is obvious that no one is here, or that if they are here, they do not want to come to the door. Then Lily puts her hand in her pocket and pulls out the key fob.
‘This,’ she says to Russ, holding it out to him in the palm of her hand. ‘It was in Carl’s filing cabinet.’
He takes it from her and examines the keys. Then he looks at the keyhole carved into the big wooden door and says, ‘It might be.’
He inserts the strange-looking key, the one Lily had been planning on taking to the key-cutter at the station tomorrow, into the lock and turns it. There’s a low click as it unlocks.
Russ and Lily look at each other. Lily nods. Russ pushes open the door.
Thirty-nine
Alice leaves Frank to his own devices that evening. He’d gone straight to the shed when they got back from lunch, claiming to be tired. But she knew he was just looking for solitude, for space in which to ponder the memories unlocked today.
She goes up to her room to check on her parents on the iPad. They’re sitting side by side on their nice John Lewis sofa, staring at the TV. She knows that neither of them has a clue what they’re watching. If she called them up now and said, What are you up to? they’d struggle to find an answer. But even in the fog of their fading faculties, they are holding hands. There are their hands, clutched together between them. They don’t know who the prime minister is; they don’t know what day of the week, month or even year it is. They can’t quite remember their daughters’ names and they certainly can’t remember if they had lunch today or what the plan is for supper tonight. They know nothing of any significance whatsoever. But they do know they love each other.
Alice turns to appraise her bed. The sheets are twisted into a very particular post-coital knot, the bedsheet wrinkled and ridged like a tide-rippled beach. She doesn’t linger over the memories of the night before. Instead she yanks off the bedclothes and rolls them into a large ball which she leaves on the landing outside her room so that they can go directly into the laundry. She tugs out a handful of clean sheets from the airing cupboard and redresses the bed, speedily and efficiently. From the corner of the room she retrieves the embroidered cushions she bought long ago to decorate her bed and which have never decorated her bed because she cannot be arsed to take them off and put them back and take them off and put them back and she is really and truly not a bed-cushion kind of person. She places the pretty cushions in a row against the puffed-up pillows and pulls the duvet smooth and then considers the effect. It is nice. It doesn’t look like a bed for having intense, life-changing sex with potentially murderous strangers. It looks like a single woman’s bed, like a place for reading novels and comforting children and talking to dogs as though they can understand what you’re saying.
On the screen of the iPad on her desk she hears her parents talking.
‘I love you,’ her father says to her mother.
‘I love you, too,’ her mother says to her father.
Then: ‘I wonder if we’re going to get any lunch today?’
Frank lies on his back, his hands clasped together over his stomach, his eyes taking in the detail of the wooden ceiling overhead: the cobwebs, the knots and whorls, the joints and cornices. His mind is clearing. It’s clearing fast. He can now remember the place where he lives. It’s a flat in a big house, down some stairs, through a door, then inside and down some more steps; there’s a living room ahead, a bedroom to the right, a hallway to the left that takes you to a kitchen and a bathroom. The walls are painted yellow. All his shoes sit in a pile by the front door. He owns trainers, and walking boots, brightly coloured football boots and several pairs of leather shoes with laces. Mostly brown. Above hang his coats. There’s a pot with an umbrella in it. A table with some keys. The floor is made of laminated wood boards of a pale apricot colour. The living room is square and scruffy, with a big battered cream sofa – he thinks it might have been a hand-me-down from his mother – and a long thin coffee table covered in paperwork and empty mugs. There’s a view through two sash windows of a wall, some white plastic garden furniture and the bulge of a green lawn above and beyond.
He’s been searching and searching this newly remembered terrain for signs of a family or of a woman but there are none. He wants to rush upstairs and tell Alice: There’s no woman! I live alone! But there’s so much more he needs to know before he can assure of her of anything.
He can remember his job. He works in a school. He teaches thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds. He’s mentally searched through the faces of the children sitting in rows in front of him, looking for the girl called Kirsty. He can’t find her face, but he can see the book on his desk and the work on the whiteboard behind him and it appears, rather appallingly, that he is a maths teacher.
He hadn’t felt like a maths teacher last night in bed with Alice. Last night he could have been anything and anyone, he’d been raw and vital, stripped down to the very essence of himself. He’d liked himself in bed with Alice, but now, with every memory, he’s whittling himself down to a smaller and smaller thing. A maths teacher, living alone in a scruffy flat.
He can hear music coming from Jasmine’s bedroom window across the courtyard. He can hear one of the dogs barking, the clatter of someone cooking in the kitc
hen. It would be so tempting to opt out of remembering, to stop the process right here, right now, crawl back into Alice’s bed, be enigmatic, empty, needy Frank for ever and never find out anything else disappointing about himself.
He rolls off the bed and opens the door to the shed. He stands in his socked feet, the evening air cold and harsh against his skin, and he looks upwards into Jasmine’s window. As he looks she appears there, framed in her window, a white-faced apparition, all eyes and hair and lips. She stares down at him for a moment; then she raises one hand at him before moving away and closing her curtains behind her.
Franks turns and goes back into the shed. No, he thinks to himself, I don’t belong here. I can’t be here, however much I wish I could. It’s not fair on Alice and it’s not fair on her children. The police will tell me who I am and then we can take it from there. He collapses back on to his bed, heavily, feeling a painful swell of tears in his gullet at the thought of leaving, at the thought of losing Alice. And then, suddenly, in his mind’s eye, there’s a red cat. A red cat called … Brenda. He sees the small brown bowl that sits in his galley kitchen, crusted with uneaten meat. He sees the cat rolled into a ball on the scruffy cream sofa. His cat, he realises, with a stab of surprise. Why would he call his cat Brenda? Then he is taken by a wave of concern. Who is feeding his cat? Who is taking care of her?
And this, more than anything, seals his resolve. This is over. Tomorrow he will know.
Forty
1993
Mark had locked Kirsty and Gray in a spare room somewhere near the top of the house where the ceilings were low and the furniture was tired and shabby. They could still hear the music from here; it pulsed through the soles of their feet and made the ill-fitting glass in the dormer windows shake and rattle. It was so loud that Mark had managed to get both of them up two flights of stairs without anyone hearing them. Kirsty sat huddled on the bed while Gray was trying to kick the door down. The door was Victorian, solidly made, and Gray’s kicking was making no impact. He went to the window, tried to open it with his left hand, but it too was locked. He smashed against the glass with his fist, on the off chance that someone might be in the garden.
Kirsty began to sob.
‘Listen,’ said Gray, joining her on the bed, ‘it’s nearly midnight. Remember what Dad said? He said if we weren’t home by midnight he was going to come here and humiliate us. Yeah? So, he’ll be here soon. OK? OK.’
She nodded and sniffled and said, ‘But Mark’ll just say we’re not here. He’ll just say we left.’
‘Well, then, Dad’ll go and try to find us. And when he can’t find us he’ll come back here. OK?’
‘But what if it’s too late, Gray?’
He turned and smiled at Kirsty. ‘He’s not going to hurt us, Kirst. I won’t let him.’
‘But look at your wrist! He’s already hurt us!’
Gray glanced down at his wrist, which hung at an obscene angle from his arm.
‘He took us by surprise. We’re prepared now. OK? We know what he is now. And we’ll be ready for him.
‘Here!’ He got up from the bed and began opening the drawers in the bedside cabinets. ‘Come on.’ He turned to Kirsty. ‘Go and check out the wardrobe. There must be something in this room we can use.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Anything! A sewing kit, a toothbrush, an old blanket. Let’s get it all out and see what we can do.’
Sweat rolled down Gray’s forehead and into his eyes. The pain of his broken wrist was diluted by the adrenaline surging through him, but still, his body was in shock. He breathed out with amazement when the first thing he found in the top drawer was a packet of Anadin. The pack had an expiry date of 1990, but he didn’t care. He popped four in his mouth and swallowed them down dry. Also in the drawer he found a tourism brochure for the local area dated August 1988, some old train tickets and a pair of dry-cleaning tags with the safety pins still attached. He took the safety pins out and laid them carefully on the top of the cabinet; then he opened the next drawer down.
Here he found some Dioralyte tablets, a packet of playing cards, some used tissues, a half-empty pack of Handy-Andys, a leaflet from Sledmere House and there, tucked away at the very back, curled into a circle, was a slim leather belt of the type that fits through loops on ladies’ dresses.
He put this with the pins on the cabinet and then went to the cabinet on the other side of the bed.
Here he found more flotsam and jetsam left behind by messy house guests: earplugs, old batteries, a word-search magazine, an elastic hairband, a Virgin Atlantic eye mask and some screwed-up sweet wrappers. He sighed and tutted.
‘What have you found?’ he asked his sister.
‘Wire coat hangers,’ she said. ‘Loads of them.’
‘Excellent,’ he hissed through gritted teeth, waiting for the pills to kick in. ‘What else?’
‘Some rank old-man trousers with stains. Blankets. A hairdryer. Moth balls. Plug-in heater. And some hats.’
‘Right.’ He began pulling wire coat hangers out of the wardrobe. ‘I reckon we could maim him quite significantly with these. What you need to do is snap the hooks off. Bend them backwards and forwards. Yeah, like that. Till they snap. Excellent. Now put a couple in your pockets. You could use them to take his eyes out. Maybe make the next one a bit longer. That’s it. Brilliant.’
He looked around the room again. There was a small wooden chair in the corner. He tried picking it up with one hand. It was too heavy to bring down on someone’s head with just his left hand. Then he noticed an Anglepoise lamp on one of the cabinets. This had a solid base, definitely heavy enough to cause concussion. A plan began to formulate. He asked Kirsty to hold the lamp while he wrenched the wire out of it. Then he moved the chair to the door. ‘You’re going to stand here,’ he whispered urgently, wiping the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand. ‘With this.’ He handed her a folded-up blanket. ‘When he comes in, drop it on his head. I’ll do the rest, OK?’
Kirsty nodded, then shook her head, then nodded again and said, ‘But what if I miss? What if it goes wrong?’
‘It won’t go wrong. And if it does, I’ll be here with this.’ He gestured at the lamp. ‘And this.’ He pointed at the ripped-out flex from the lamp and the plastic belt. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, just get off the chair and hit him with it. Then use the wire hooks to hurt him. Just use anything and everything. OK? The most important thing is that we get out of this room. Once we’re out we can get help. So we need to be animals, Kirsty. Yes? Animals.’
She nodded uncertainly and he took her in his arms and held her tight against him. ‘I love you, Kirst,’ he said. ‘Whatever happens, I want you to know that. You’re the best sister anyone could ever hope for. I’m so proud of you. And I love you.’
She pushed her face closer into his chest and he rested his chin on the crown of her head and stared hard at the ceiling rose above. The pills weren’t working. His wrist screamed out at him, like a thousand electric shocks being pumped through his arm. He wanted to lie down and cry. But he needed to stay alert. He needed to keep his sister safe.
There was a noise at the door and they broke apart. Kirsty stepped on to the chair, unfurling the blanket. Gray stood to one side, the lamp held firm in his left hand, the pain in his right suddenly gone.
Forty-one
‘Hello! Hello!’ Lily steps slowly and cautiously across the tiled hallway. ‘Hello! Is there anyone here?’
Russ follows behind her, searching the walls for light switches. He finds one and when he turns it on a large crystal chandelier overhead slowly lights up, revealing a thick network of dusty cobwebs.
‘Wow,’ she says, looking around her. It is like a stately home. Like the grand buildings in central Kiev: the banks and the insurance companies. Doors open up from four points off the central hallway; double doors to the left and the right, then smaller doors behind the staircase. Above is a glass dome through which she can see the burnished golden cl
ouds. The air smells old and stale, but not damp. She turns right and pushes through the double doors there. They lead into a grand sitting room. It is full of elegant, threadbare furniture and half-packed cardboard boxes. A door at the other end leads through to an anteroom: a vase of dusty dried flowers on the windowsill, a velvet moth-eaten armchair. They pass through here, quietly, nervously, into a remarkable room: it is made entirely of glass and ornate wrought iron and is filled with desiccated palm trees and dusty rockeries, dead rubber plants and shrivelled trees. It smells of earth and decay. But there at the other end is an arrangement of nice rattan furniture, a glass-topped coffee table, lamps with ragged shades, suggesting that this was once a fine room in which to sit and enjoy the greenery.
A door to their left leads into a kitchen, long and narrow with five windows overlooking the lawned garden. It is decorated in the style of the 1970s: rust-coloured Formica countertops and pine doors, low-hanging orange plastic lampshades, plastic-topped bar stools at a breakfast bar. Everything is covered in a fine layer of grease and dust.
They find themselves back in the hallway and explore the rooms on the other side of the house. A large dining room, a smaller room with clubby leather armchairs and a bar built into a corner, and a cloakroom with a painted porcelain handbasin and a cistern with a chain set high up the wall.
As they emerge once more into the hallway, Russ says, ‘Well, I’m pretty sure there’s no one living here.’
‘But the woman!’ she replies. ‘She answered the phone!’
‘This is true. But seriously. Look at this place. You can just tell. It’s got that air about it. Of abandonment.’
‘Come on,’ she says, ‘let’s go upstairs.’
She grips the mahogany banister and looks upwards. It’s a staircase from an old-fashioned American movie, sweeping into two dramatic curves as it heads upwards towards the glass dome. The first landing leads to four large bedrooms. The second landing leads to two attic rooms. Each door opens at their touch; each room is empty. But on the top floor, a door is locked. Russ and Lily exchange a look. Russ tries the handle after Lily. It rattles in its setting, but doesn’t budge.