by Abbie Frost
Hannah stayed silent. She wondered how much hate Lucy must have bottled up inside her and thought about what that sort of hate could make someone do.
Lucy rubbed away a tear with a dirty hand. ‘He said he would have done the same to you too, if he hadn’t loved you so much, been so proud of you. He told my mother she was a coward, but your mum was brave and strong. He never needed to beat her, she always did what she was told. It was Mum’s fault he got angry, because she was so pathetic.’
‘Why didn’t she do something?’
Her eyes glinted with anger. ‘She tried. Of course she fucking tried. But we were so isolated, she had no one to turn to. There used to be a proper driveway to the house, but he had Rob dig some of it up and let the rest go wild. His Land Rover was the only thing that could get close.’
Lucy stared out towards the pool. ‘She called the police the day Rob nearly lost his hand, hoping they might get suspicious, and she rang them at other times too, but nothing happened. When Sandeep came into the house, he was always hiding in the other room, listening.’
‘But why did she make those accusations against Sandeep, when he was trying to help?’
Lucy laughed. ‘Why do you think? It was him. He made the complaint – the lord of the fucking manor – and of course everyone believed him. And when they came to interview Mum, there he was with a hand on her shoulder.’
She shook her head. ‘You know what the worst thing is?’ Her eyes bored into Hannah’s, daring her to respond. ‘He told me this – all of it – with my mum sitting there next to me. Making sure we both knew there was no hope. There was no way out. We belonged to him.’
She fell silent and they listened to the drip of a pipe somewhere in the darkness. Eventually Lucy sighed. ‘But Mum did keep trying.’
‘So what happened?’
Lucy stared at her, her expression blank. ‘He kept his promise. He killed her.’
Chapter Fifty-Five
Ten years ago
Maddie
She hurts everywhere, but it’s going to be all right. They’re in the Land Rover, Mummy took it when he was asleep, and she’s driving really fast. They’re going to the hospital and the doctors will make it better. As long as Maddie doesn’t say anything and only Mummy talks.
She’s frightened as they pull up at the hospital, its car park full of cars, millions of cars. Inside there are so many people, more people than she’s ever seen before. She didn’t know they could all fit inside one building at the same time. Although she’s in a little cubicle with Mummy, she can hear them all outside, their voices talking and shouting like a thousand arguments between Mummy and Daddy all happening at once.
The doctor is kind, but he looks sad and worried. He asks their names, but Mummy tells him the wrong ones. The doctor does some stitches and other things to make her feel better. He says he will get her a bed, because she has to stay here for a while.
But when he goes out, Mummy gets up to leave.
‘Daddy will find us if we’re not back by morning,’ she says.
‘Can’t we stay here?’ Maddie points at the mattress. ‘He said I can sleep in a bed.’ And Mummy starts to cry and puts Maddie’s coat around her and they walk out.
A nurse asks if they’re all right and Mummy says, ‘Yes,’ then whispers to Maddie to hurry. But they’re not all right, not really. And when they get outside, she tells her to run and they run, with Mummy lifting her off her feet when she can’t go fast enough.
As Mummy drives, she keeps looking over her shoulder. Maddie asks her again, very quietly, if she can stay in the lovely hospital. But Mummy says he will find them if they stay there and things will be worse.
When Mummy brings her food a few days later her face is all bruised, like Maddie’s face sometimes is. That’s never happened before to Mummy. He never hurts her face.
She’s crying. ‘Even though I gave a false name,’ she says. ‘Someone at the hospital must have recognized me and told the doctor. The doctor contacted social services and they called round this morning.’
A wild little hope. ‘Are they going to help us?’
Mummy shakes her head, tears dripping onto Maddie’s hands. ‘I’m sorry, darling. He was there and made me say it wasn’t me, it couldn’t have been, because we don’t have any children.’
Maddie touches Mummy’s eye where it’s all purple and red. Her finger comes away wet with tears. ‘Can’t we run away?’
Mummy shakes her head. ‘I want to, I want to get you away from here, but it’s impossible. I don’t have any money and he’ll never let the Land Rover keys out of his sight again.’
Maddie puts her arms around her, resting her head against Mummy’s poor face. ‘I have to go now,’ Mummy whispers, and she looks suddenly very serious. ‘But I want to show you something first.’ She gets up, goes to the door, and shows Maddie how to open the bolts to her room from the inside. ‘Just in case,’ she says. ‘In case something happens.’ And Maddie feels sick, like she’s eaten all her food in one go, but she watches what to do. ‘You can practise when I’m gone, but don’t let him find out.’
Tonight Maddie is so hungry she can’t sleep. Then she remembers what Mummy taught her about the bolts. It’s the middle of the night so it will be safe. The doors out into the house are never locked, Mummy makes sure of that, in case there’s a fire or something. So Maddie creeps out, across the cold, cold hallway and into the kitchen.
In one of the cupboards she finds an open packet of biscuits and stuffs one into her mouth. Then another, crumbs falling onto her T-shirt. Her hand shakes as it hovers over the packet. She can’t, not another one, he might notice. There’s an open loaf of sliced bread in the bread bin, so she takes a piece and bites into it.
A tiny laugh from the doorway, a sound she knows so well. Maddie feels like she’s been slapped already, her face goes all funny and her hand shakes even more. She tries to swallow the mouthful, but can’t get it down. Keeps chewing. He just stands there in his silky dressing gown, watching her, with a little smile on his face. She hates that smile.
There’s nothing to do or say, it never does any good, she just has to hope it’s over quickly.
He grabs her arm in one hand and her face in the other, squeezing her cheeks until she spits out the bread onto the floor.
‘Leave her alone.’ It’s Mummy’s voice. ‘She’s just hungry because she’s growing. Let her go back downstairs.’
He doesn’t answer, just pushes Maddie onto her knees. ‘Pick it up,’ he points at the piece of soggy bread. ‘Eat it if you want it that badly.’ When she does what he wants he slaps the back of her head. ‘All of it, you filthy little—’
But Mummy pushes him out of the way. ‘Maddie, go back downstairs now.’ She can’t move. ‘Please, Maddie, just go,’ Mummy says.
Then Maddie goes as quickly as she can, so she doesn’t have to hear what happens next. She climbs into her sleeping bag and closes her ears, but the bangs and crashes seem to go on forever, even longer than usual. Until, finally, it’s all quiet. Quieter than it’s ever been before.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Lucy stopped, her face like stone. ‘Later that day he came down and said she had fallen from an upstairs window. He was actually smiling when he told me, as if he couldn’t wait to see what I would do, told me she was dead and they’d already taken her away, so I would never see her again. “Be careful,” he said. “Or the same thing will happen to you.”’
Something in her eyes made Hannah look away. ‘So how did you escape?’
‘Things got worse after that and I was hardly ever allowed out of this room. But I was only ten years old, so I didn’t even think of trying to get out for years. I was used to it, you see, scared of the outside world. Whenever Jack was away I would see Rob in the garden. Sometimes he would bring me some decent food, or I would manage to steal some from the larder or the fridge. I would swim and try to remember my mother. But as I grew older, I got braver, and I knew I had to get out.’
Her hands fiddled with the hem of her top. ‘Rob wanted to help me, but I wouldn’t let him, not after what Jack did to his hand. And his little cottage was the only home he’d ever known. Jack used to say he would kill Rob, if I ever got away, and I believed him. He said he’d created evidence that proved it was Rob who killed my mother. Told Rob the same, that he would take the evidence to the police if Rob ever talked about what happened here.’
‘Fucking hell.’ It was all Hannah could say.
‘I was terrified of the outside world,’ Lucy went on. ‘Kept thinking about all the bad people out there.’ She laughed grimly. ‘They seemed so real. But as I got older, I began to realize that everything I had been told was a lie. I knew Rob and the doctor and nurses at the hospital weren’t bad, and the policeman had tried to help. There were good people in books as well.’
‘What happened when you finally got away? Didn’t he come after you? He could have killed you.’
A tiny sniff, a sharp movement of the eyes. ‘I knew I had to make sure he couldn’t do that.’
That must have been why she had changed her name. ‘So did you come back when you found out he had died?’ Hannah asked.
Lucy looked down and shook her head.
Hannah’s hands felt suddenly sticky. ‘Did you even know he was dead?’
‘Oh yes, I knew.’
‘So why return after all this time? I mean, even if the rest of us were fooled by the website, you must have recognized the place for what it was.’
Lucy reached into her pocket again and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. She handed it to Hannah without a word. Hannah turned it over and looked at the barely legible note:
Deer Maddie. There doing up the house. You need to come bak and see bout your dad. Rob
Hannah rose to her knees and slowly moved back, desperately trying to convince herself she was imagining this – it couldn’t be. ‘What? What does he mean? See about your dad?’
Lucy sighed impatiently. ‘Rob thought Preserve the Past was genuine. And he knew I needed to take care of things back here, before they did any more renovations.’
Take care of things.
Lucy smiled, but there was no warmth in it. Her fingers played with the hem of her top, back and forth, back and forth. The only sound was the drip of a pipe somewhere nearby. A cold hand reached into Hannah’s heart and squeezed.
‘Lucy,’ she said, as she began to edge away towards the door. ‘What did you do?’
A grim little smile. ‘I killed him. I killed Jack Roper. I killed our father.’
Chapter Fifty-Seven
The room exploded into colour and movement, as Hannah found herself on her feet scrabbling at the door. She was already halfway through it before Lucy jumped up.
‘Hannah, wait!’ Lucy called.
Hannah stopped, ready to run if Lucy moved. ‘You killed him!’ She stood, shaking, her hand on the door. Desperate to get away, but desperate to make sense of it all.
She stared at Lucy. ‘You killed my dad and then you killed all of the guests. I knew it – I knew it was you.’
Sandeep and Rosa would have been easy, and she remembered Lucy coming in windblown on the morning of the walk. That must have been when she attacked Rob, to stop him betraying her, to clean everything up this time. She had lured him to that grove of trees and knocked him into the ditch.
‘You’re not listening,’ Lucy said. ‘I didn’t do it.’ She took one step forward, but stopped and raised her hands when Hannah got ready to run through the door. Hannah was holding her breath, but Lucy’s was loud in the silence. ‘I only killed him,’ she said. ‘I had to. It was the only way out.’
Hannah kept a tight grip on the door, her hand slippery. ‘Then why did you come back?’
‘To get rid of evidence,’ Lucy said.
‘Couldn’t Rob have done it for you? I mean, he was still here.’
‘I left it to Rob the first time and …’ She shook her head. ‘I had to do it properly, get rid of it forever.’
A lump of lead had settled in Hannah’s stomach. ‘I don’t understand.’
Lucy spoke in a low monotone and a smile crawled across her face. ‘Rob gave me a hammer.’ She seemed more in control now, more like the Lucy Hannah had met when she first arrived – what seemed like years ago now – but Hannah wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. ‘And I got out and hid in the kitchen behind the door. When Jack came in, I beat him over the head.’ Another tiny smile.
Hannah inched backwards, millimetre by millimetre, hardly daring to breathe.
Lucy didn’t seem to notice. ‘But he looked so awful and I was so scared, I just sat there crying. After what seemed like hours, Rob found me and told me he would take care of the body. He said everything was going to be all right, that no one would ever know, that he deserved to die and that I wasn’t to blame.’ A deep shaky sigh. ‘Then I ran to the road and hitched a lift to Dublin.’
She walked over to the wall and ran a finger over the picture of the little girl. ‘And I wasn’t Maddie any more – I was Lucy. When I got there, I had to live on the streets, begging for money. Damian found me and looked after me. We made music together and for the first time I was happy. My friends knew my age, knew I ran away from home and had no documentation. They looked after me.’ She smiled. ‘Eventually I told Damian some of it – about the way Jack Roper had treated me – and I couldn’t believe it, but Damian said he still loved me.’
‘So Rob buried Jack for you?’
‘I thought he would, but when I sent him a letter from Dublin, asking if everything was all right, he wrote back and said he was too scared to take the body outside. The ground was so hard it could only be a shallow grave and there were too many walkers about.’
Her eyes flitted back towards the cellar and Hannah tried to swallow. Oh God.
‘He thought it would be safer inside the house where he could keep watch over it.’
Hannah inched further away. ‘The freezer?’ She choked out the words, and Lucy nodded. ‘So that was why,’ Hannah said. ‘That’s why you stopped me checking that humming sound, why you tried so hard to keep us out of the cellar.’
But Lucy carried on as if she hadn’t heard. ‘Everyone thought Jack had gone abroad and the house still belonged to him.’
But something didn’t make sense. ‘And Preserve the Past?’ Hannah spotted her torch on the floor by her foot.
A suspicious sideways glance. ‘I knew nothing about that, until Rob contacted me. It must have been someone who found out Jack was dead and pretended to be his agent, to cash in maybe. It could have been Liam.’ The blue eyes flashed at her. ‘Or … it could have been you. After all, you were one of the only people who knew he was dead.’
Hannah stepped back. ‘I don’t believe you. I think you did it.’ When Lucy didn’t respond, she thought of something else. ‘Or Declan O’Hare. It could have been him. He wrote to my mum to say Jack had died.’
Lucy’s smile was almost a smirk. ‘It wasn’t him,’ she said very softly.
‘You … you wrote that letter?’
‘I had to make sure his other family – the one he was always praising – didn’t come looking for him. I knew about your mother’s job. With Facebook and all the rest it wasn’t difficult to find your address.’
‘But you suggested I come to the house.’
‘I couldn’t resist.’ Lucy smiled again and Hannah felt her body tense. ‘I wanted to see this perfect daughter,’ Lucy said. ‘The daughter he always told me about. Just once.’ A hard accusing look again. ‘But you didn’t come.’
‘And what would you have done if I had? Would you have killed me too?’
Lucy laughed. ‘I don’t know.’ A chill went through Hannah. ‘Maybe I would have explained everything to you and we would have talked together.’ Lucy took a step closer, speaking almost pleadingly. ‘Talked like this. Like sisters.’
The light switch, on the wall only a foot away from Hannah. If she could ju
st … But Lucy was muttering again, holding up the picture of little Hannah.
‘I used to talk to you, every fucking night, tell you all my secrets. Ask you to come and help me.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘You should have come. Why didn’t you come?’
A sick wave of fear washed over Hannah and with a jerk and a snap she reached out and hit the light, enveloping them in complete darkness. As she turned to run, she heard Lucy scream but didn’t pause to find out why. Slamming the door behind her she shot the bolts home and stepped away from it. Listened, her blood roaring in her ears, but not a sound came from inside the room. Nothing.
For a moment she almost convinced herself that the room was empty, that the whole thing had been some warped nightmare. But then she heard a tiny sob coming from behind the door. Stepping back, her movements slow and quiet, she began to creep away. Hannah needed to find Chloe and get her out of here fast.
Moving as silently as she could along the pool, shining the torch in front of her, Hannah headed to the only section she hadn’t checked. If Chloe wasn’t there, she might be back in the cellar, or somewhere upstairs in the house.
The smell of chlorine made her stomach churn, but she forced herself to keep it together. The torchlight grew dimmer and dimmer, but she kept searching.
After what seemed like hours, she reached the tunnel entrance again. She’d done a full circuit and Chloe wasn’t here. To be sure she gave one more flash of the torch around the whole pool. Her heart stopped as the beam faltered. It flickered on and then off again, buzzed, and then died. She stood in the pitch-black and fumbled out the batteries, felt their reassuring weight in her sticky hand. Switched them round and clicked them back into place, hit the switch and waited. But nothing happened. She shook the torch and tried again, her hands slippery with sweat, her heart thudding. All she could see was darkness and the only sound was her own harsh breathing.
Work, fucking work. She kept glancing towards Lucy’s cell, but the light never came on. She thought about her sitting in there in the dark, in complete silence, about what it must be like to be Lucy. The child who didn’t make it.