I Spy
I Spy
Claire Kendal
Copyright (#uf4e780a2-8b4c-5fb4-85dc-5c4a015474b1)
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Copyright © Claire Kendal 2019
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019 Cover photograph © John Cooper/Arcangel Images (https://www.arcangel.com/creative-stock-photography)
Claire Kendal asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008256838
Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008256852
Version: 2019-05-23
Dedication (#uf4e780a2-8b4c-5fb4-85dc-5c4a015474b1)
For my brother Robert
Contents
Cover (#u4adba48e-8baa-57d5-94bc-c4b42b1ba37e)
Title Page (#ub36e3e95-7cb3-5604-993b-115d17249c24)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue An Interview
Now A Discovery
Then Black Star Sapphire
Now The Girl with the Two-Coloured Eye
Then Human Asset
Now The Two Tunnels
Then The Plague Pit
Now The Backwards House
Then The Forgotten Things
Now The Woman in the Room
Then A Quarrel
Now The Excursion
Then Provocations
Now Further Warnings
Then Eavesdropping
Now Persistence
Then Concealment
Now The Robin
Then Startling Intelligence
Now The Visit
Then A Meeting
Now An Assault
Then April Fool
Now An Ambush
Then The Handkerchief Tree
Now The Doors With No Knobs
Then A Misadventure
Now A Misdemeanour
Then The Studio
Now Further Intelligence
Then The Spin Out
Now Illegal Entry
Then The Memory Box
Now The Choice
Then The Drowning Place
Now Thorpe Hall
Now The Miniature
Now The Present
Keep Reading …
Acknowledgements
For those affected by the issues in this novel
About the Author
Also by Claire Kendal
About the Publisher
Epigraph (#uf4e780a2-8b4c-5fb4-85dc-5c4a015474b1)
‘You have almost completed your painting,’ said I, approaching to observe it more closely, and surveying it with a greater degree of admiration and delight than I cared to express. ‘A few more touches in the foreground will finish it I should think.—But why have you called it Fernley Manor, Cumberland, instead of Wildfell Hall, —shire?’ I asked, alluding to the name she had traced in small characters at the bottom of the canvass.
But immediately I was sensible of having committed an act of impertinence in so doing; for she coloured and hesitated; but after a moment’s pause, with a kind of desperate frankness, she replied,—
‘Because I have friends—acquaintances at least—in the world, from whom I desire my present abode to be concealed; and as they might see the picture, and might possibly recognize the style in spite of the false initials I have put in the corner, I take the precaution to give a false name to the place also, in order to put them on a wrong scent, if they should attempt to trace me out by it.’
Anne Brontë,
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,
Chapter V, ‘The Studio’
Prologue An Interview (#uf4e780a2-8b4c-5fb4-85dc-5c4a015474b1)
London, April 2013
The clear glass table meant that I had to work extra hard to stop my knee from jerking up and down. It was not a time to show nervousness. Maxine was on one side of the table. I was on the other.
‘You are twenty-one, Holly. Correct?’ She started simply, but her use of my first name was a warning. She had only ever called me by my surname.
‘Correct.’
‘Do you have many friends?’
‘A few good ones.’
She nodded. I had never seen her nod before. Nodding is a gesture that suggests interest, and that wasn’t something she normally allowed herself to show.
‘It’s good to be selective.’ She smiled. I hadn’t seen her do that before either.
‘I’m glad you think so.’
‘And your grandmother raised you?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s sad about your parents. What a thing to happen.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘You were two?’
She’d got it wrong on purpose. I was certain of it. ‘Three.’ Was I right to correct her? Should I have let it go? What was the best response? I needed to quit second-guessing what she wanted to hear and just say what was true.
‘It was a car crash?’ Maxine didn’t have any notes. She didn’t need any notes. She was in command of my ‘facts’ without having to write them down.
‘Yes.’ It was crucial to keep it brief.
‘I apologise for the personal nature of some of the questions I have to ask you.’ Had she really used the word ‘apologise’? Maxine?
The lights in the room were unnaturally bright. The wall behind me was extremely white. But the wall behind Maxine, which I was facing, was a mirror of glass. It was a safe bet that it was one-way glass, and my performance was being assessed from the other side of it, in a darkened room. I imagined Maxine’s boss, Martin, behind the glass, enjoying the peep show but appearing bored.
‘You’ve known the Hargrave family for how long?’
‘Since I was four. Most of my life.’ I felt my lips trembling. My body was not under my control. I was losing it. Why did this woman scare me so much?
‘Tell me about them.’ Maxine settled in her chair, ready to be entertained.
‘Peggy is the mother, James is the father. They have a daughter.’
There was that smile again. The indulgent kind you give to a difficult child. ‘And the daughter has a name, I presume?’
‘Sorry. Yes. Milly.’ Maxine knew this already, despite the pretence. I’d given permission for them to interview friends and family. I’d had to, though there weren’t many. Peggy, James, and Milly. My list of three, because my grandmother hardly knew what day of the week she was living any more.
‘You and Milly are very close, aren’t you? Best friends, as they say.’
‘I’d never tell her’ – I flapped around for the right phrase – ‘anything I shouldn’t.’
‘Of course you wouldn’t. Milly’s family moved next door when you were four?’
‘Yes.’ Elaboration was not my friend.
I reminded myself that these were the easy questions. The seemingly innocuous warm-up questions to lull me into the false sense of security that would get me to mess up and reveal every vulnerability I’d ever had. My stomach knotted, and I tried not to let myself panic about what might be coming.
‘And you moved in when?’
‘I was born in that house. My grandmother moved in to look after me when my parents died. Milly’s family bought the house next door just before the two of us started school – she and I are the same age.’
‘Your grandmother was quite old when she became your guardian, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes.’
Maxine smiled again, and I shivered so hard it must have been visible on the other side of the one-way glass. ‘That can’t have been much fun for a small child.’
I tried to think of what to say to this, but I took too long, so Maxine went on. ‘You are close to Milly’s mother? Peggy, you said?’
‘Yes.’
‘Peggy must have seen you as a poor little neglected orphan.’ Maxine was a combination of effortful glamour and mess. Her hair was bottle-blonde but lank. Pieces of different lengths hung in front of her face, as if she’d hacked at them herself.
‘I think she probably did, yes.’
‘Tell me more, Holly.’ That jagged curtain of hair was one of Maxine’s tactics for hiding, though I managed a glimpse of hooded eyes that were grey that day but could easily be changed with contact lenses.
‘I think Peggy wanted – she still wants – to protect me. To mother me, even.’ I was saying too much when I needed to be spare in my answers. Part of what Maxine was testing was that I could be reserved, even under pressure.
‘And Peggy’s husband is around – James Hargrave. What is he like?’ Maxine pushed her hair behind her ears. Not a Maxine gesture. Her mascara and eyeliner were heavy. She had gone for her usual indigo. No ordinary black for her. The foundation was caked on. Maxine was a woman of many faces.
‘He runs the town pharmacy.’
‘And?’
‘James is very kind, but he doesn’t say much.’
I didn’t explain that it was as if Peggy had such a lot to say there was nothing left for James – and they both seemed to like it that way.
‘Very kind? That’s mild. You aren’t damning by faint praise?’
‘There is a lot to be said for real kindness.’ As soon as the words were out, I wanted to take them back – she was going to think I was judging her, that I was rebuking her.
‘I agree,’ she said, but this didn’t make me relax. ‘And your grandmother is fond of the Hargrave family? As fond as you clearly are?’
‘My grandmother hates pretty much everybody.’
Maxine laughed, something I hadn’t seen her do even once during the residential phase of the recruitment process, which she was leading. Along with the other aspiring intelligence officers, I watched Maxine as if she were a superstar.
‘But she worships James,’ I said.
‘You are admirably loyal, Holly, aren’t you? Am I correct in thinking that you gave up your place at Exeter University to look after your grandmother? You were going to read Modern Languages?’
‘I couldn’t leave my grandmother alone. I’d been trying to delay putting her in a nursing home, so I enrolled on a BA in English at Falmouth instead of the Exeter course – I can commute to Falmouth pretty easily from our house. I’m due to graduate this summer.’
‘You’re predicted a first.’
‘Yes. And I took every evening course they offered in French, Spanish, and German, to try to compensate for not being able to do Modern Languages. I’m fluent in all three – I studied them in school too.’
‘You got As for all three at A level, and an A in English Literature. Correct?’
‘Yes. And I can get by in Italian. I’ve been working towards a career in the Security Service for as long as I can remember.’
I had been obsessed with spies since I was a very little girl. My grandmother told me that my father used to play ‘I Spy’ with me, using the game to show me the world. I liked to imagine him in his blue-grey RAF uniform, pointing into the night, where he would soon be flying.
I Spy with my little eye, something far up in the sky …
… Moon.
When I was five, I tiptoed into the sitting room and hid behind my grandmother’s brown-velvet wingback chair to peek at a film she was watching. I sat, cross-legged, on her scratchy brown carpet, so perfectly still and quiet she never knew I was there. To this day I don’t know what the film was called. Only that it was about a spy who pretended to his family he was a boring businessman. Then, a bad spy injected him with truth serum, and this made him confess to his wife about his double life as an intelligence officer.
With the reasoning of a five-year-old, I decided to make my own truth serum and administer it to my grandmother, using the best available laboratory facilities. While she was cooking dinner, I sneaked into her bedroom and scooped out tiny spoonfuls of the lotions and scents on her dressing table, then stirred them into the moisturising cream she rubbed onto her face each night. My fantasy was that the serum would force my grandmother into revealing the secrets I was certain she was keeping about my parents.
When I was ready to begin the interrogation, I noticed that she had a bright-red and extremely bumpy rash on her cheeks. She never imagined the cause, and I crept back into her room to steal the cream away and dispose of it at the bottom of the kitchen rubbish so she would never use it again. I was frightened that I’d mortally injured her, but she seemed to recover quickly.
On my eighth birthday, Harriet the Spy appeared in my Christmas stocking, and Harriet became my absolute hero. She carried her spy notebook everywhere, so I did too, writing little observations about everything I saw. I made things up as well. It was only later that I learned that spies were supposed to keep to what was true, and were trained to be cautious about what they put on paper – two principles I wasn’t very good at heeding.
‘I can see that you have been commendably strategic and goal-driven in wanting to join us.’ Maxine gave me another of those intimate nods. ‘But in this line of work, how far would you push it? You’re very attractive.’ Despite the appeasing gestures, Maxine shifted the subject with the suddenness of a window exploding in a storm. ‘You know that.’
I blinked at this new Maxine. She was being kind but firm, friendly but still clearly the one with the power.
She pushed at me again. ‘Where does the line come, Holly?’
I realised I was biting the side of my lower lip, a sign of the anxiety I wanted to hide. ‘Emotional. Emotional involvement. That’s the line I wouldn’t cross.’
Maxine was in full-friend mode, pretending that the two of us were just ordinary women exchanging confidences. ‘So as long as it isn’t emotional …’ her voice was gentle, understanding ‘… physical involvement is okay – to – a – point.’ She tapped the table’s bevelled edge with her index finger, picking it up and setting it down again a few centimetres further along with her last three words, as if counting.
‘Are you asking – if I would sleep with someone for the role?’ I imagined Martin on the other side of the one-way glass, controlling any impulse to sit up straighter or open his mouth wide. He wouldn’t react at all.
‘Now that you mention it.’
I thought I was saying the right thing, but I pictured Martin, no longer able to disguise his interest, sticking his feet out and crossing them at the ankles, leaning back in his chair and shaking his head. Because he could see that I was a fish being reeled in. ‘No, No I wouldn’t.’
‘Are you sure?’ Maxine said this as if she were trying to help me, trying to tell me I had given the wrong answer and should flip it.
‘That would be like prostituting myself for the country. So no.’ My shoe was tapping wildly against the white-tiled floor. I froze, and the absence of noise from it was too noticeable.
‘Even if it was the only way to save your life and the lives of hundreds of others?’
I was flailing, trying to guess what she wanted to hear rather than saying what I thought. Which was the worst thing I could do. ‘If it was for the role. I would be happy to – to go as far as I needed to for the role.’
Maxine’s usual un-reactiveness was gone. She tilted her head, a questioning gesture of moral disgust, as if in disbelief that she’d heard me right. ‘What if you had a boyfriend?’
‘I would go – ahead – and tell him afterwards.’ I was bobbing my head up and down, trying to signal that I meant what I said, that I was trustworthy.
Maxine’s girlfriend pretence had vanished. ‘So you’d cheat to get information.’
I had wanted the job with MI5 more than I ever wanted anything, and I had got so far and so close after multiple tests of my situational judgement and core skills. But it was rushing away from me faster than water down a drain.
Maxine shook her head. She said the most important thing she ever said to me. The thing I would replay all the time.
‘You know, a physical relationship is not acceptable. You are making yourself vulnerable. It’s all about using this.’ She almost smiled. She placed a hand on each side of her head without actually touching it. ‘Rather than that’ – she lowered her hands from her breasts to her hips, again without touching herself – ‘to get what you need.’
There was nothing left for me to do. I knew the implications of what I had said, and that there was no recovering from it.
‘I think,’ said Maxine, ‘that this brings your interview to an end.’
When I was very little, my grandmother often chose my bedtime stories from Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children. Her favourite had a huge mouthful of a title. ‘MATILDA Who told Lies, and was Burned to Death.’ This was probably because my grandmother hated my mother, and my mother’s name was Matilda. It didn’t occur to my grandmother that having a heroine who was my mother’s namesake would only make me love her more.
Plus, my grandmother could never convince me that Matilda was really dead. ‘It was a trick,’ I would say. ‘Matilda hid in a fireproof cellar but the story forgot to tell us.’ I didn’t confess to my grandmother that I often dreamed my parents were still alive, and it had all been a mistake. I never believed in the words ‘The End’ when my grandmother finished and snapped the book closed. I was convinced the characters continued on somewhere, and I would try to imagine the next phase of their lives for myself.
All in all, the effect of my grandmother’s cautionary tales was not what she intended. They just gave me ideas about the interesting things I could do, and alerted me to potential disasters so I could try to figure out how to avoid them, though I didn’t always succeed.
My grandmother was forever muttering about listeners at keyholes being vexed, and eavesdroppers never hearing good of themselves. ‘That is what you must reflect upon, Holly,’ she would say.
The best response to this, like most of the things my grandmother said, was the word, ‘Yes’, usually accompanied by a solemn nod. But in truth, the only thing I reflected upon was how to avoid detection.
Soon after they moved into the house next door, Peggy discovered me lying like a tiger along a high branch of my grandmother’s apple tree. It was the end of summer, and I was watching Peggy play with Milly on the other side of the fence that ran between our houses, while James manned the barbeque.
Peggy thought that this incident was an aberration. She saw me as a sweet little girl whose loneliness and longing for family had put her in danger, though it was Peggy’s own startled screech at seeing me in the tree that almost made me fall out of it. But my spying was no aberration. I simply made sure Peggy never caught me at it again.
Peggy was in the habit of leaving the laundry room window open so she could dangle out the hose that vented the hot air from her tumble dryer. The laundry room was Peggy’s favourite place for private conversations. I could peek from my father’s dusty first-floor study and see right into that laundry room.
I loved my father’s study, where I often hunted for clues about my parents, though I only ever found one thing. A photograph of them on their wedding day, hidden in his copy of A Tale of Two Cities. I liked to sit and read in my father’s old armchair, which was covered in green leather. I’d dragged it near the window. From there, I could monitor what was happening at Peggy’s. If her washing machine and tumble dryer were off, then listening in was no challenge. In fact, I regarded such a circumstance as an invitation.
And that is how I came to hear Peggy and Milly talking together when I was back home in St Ives, two months after my disastrous final MI5 interview. As soon as I saw that the laundry room light was on and Peggy and Milly had gone in, I ran downstairs, slipped into the garden, squeezed through the rip in the fence Milly and I always used as a not-very-secret passage, and flattened myself against a tangle of Peggy’s honeysuckle.
‘She’s so deflated,’ Peggy was saying, ‘since she’s come home. I think she’s embarrassed about the reason – she can’t bear to look your father in the eye.’
I’d had to say something about why MI5 didn’t give me the job, because Peggy and James and Milly knew I’d got to the final stage of the recruitment process. There was no disguising the outcome.
‘She was brave to tell us, Mum,’ Milly said. ‘And fucking stupid.’
‘You don’t need to use that language, Milly.’
But Milly was right. I had been stupid to reveal the truth about the way I’d messed up. What had possessed me to give them the details? Perhaps I did it because it was the most un-spy-like action I could take, a kind of embracing of my failure. It was an act of self-sabotage I decided never to repeat.
‘Sorry.’ Milly didn’t sound at all sorry. ‘People say all sorts of shit.’
‘Honestly, Milly,’ Peggy said.
‘She wanted us to see her real self,’ said Milly. ‘To see her at her worst and still love her. She knows she’s not going to save the world by fucking someone.’
I imagined Peggy rolling her eyes in weariness at Milly’s continued swearing. ‘She’d never have actually done it,’ Peggy said. ‘Those recruiters were fools to believe she would.’
The scent of honeysuckle was choking me, mixed with the nearby roses I had been trying not to stab myself with. Somehow, though, a thorn caught my finger and my eyes welled up as I sucked away the blood and hoped that Peggy was right.
Now A Discovery (#uf4e780a2-8b4c-5fb4-85dc-5c4a015474b1)
Five and a half years later
Bath, Tuesday, 25 December 2018
I know the day is going to be bad as soon as I see the kingfisher. He is so perfect, captured beneath the surface of the ice. He stops me in my run as if I have slammed into an invisible wall. Just like him.
I peer over the railings of the small bridge at the frozen water below, for a closer look. He must have been fishing, when the water thickened and trapped him. The vivid blue of his tail, and the dots on the top of his head, are clear beneath the thin layer above him. He is beautifully preserved in his ice cube. There is no sign he fought it, with those wings cupping his body so peacefully, his beak closed and pointed straight ahead.
I cannot bear to look any more, and if I don’t get going I will be late for my visit to my grandmother at the nursing home. So I tear my eyes away and resume my run, trying to tell myself it isn’t a bad omen, but knowing deep down that it must be.
My grandmother has refused to get out of bed today, so Katarina takes me upstairs to her room. The door is open a crack, but not wide enough for me to see in. The sharp scent of lemon disinfectant makes the inside of my nose prickle.
‘Who’s that!’ my grandmother says.
I push the door wide open. ‘It’s me, Grandma.’
‘Who are you? I don’t know you.’ My grandmother rattles the safety rails of her bed like an angry child. ‘You’re not Princess Anne.’
‘No. Sorry. It’s just me. Just Holly.’ It isn’t possible for my grandmother to call me anything else. I moved her from the nursing home in St Ives to this one in Bath twenty months ago, and I told Katarina and the others who look after her here that Holly has always been my grandmother’s nickname for me, but that my actual name is Helen.
‘Go away. Go get Princess Anne.’
‘After I’ve spent a little time with you.’ I bend to kiss my grandmother’s cheek. She is wearing the lilac nightdress and matching bed jacket that I asked Katarina to put under the tree for her. Katarina has arranged the pillows so that my grandmother is sitting up.
I move a slippery vinyl chair closer to the bed. I lift one of her hands. The skin is loose, and so thin it tears when she bruises. The surface is a jungle of liver spots and protruding green veins. Her fingers are bent as the gnarled branches of a weathered tree. ‘Happy Christmas, Grandma.’
‘Is it Christmas?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that why you’re wearing that ridiculous red hat?’
‘Yes. Katarina gave it to me. There’s going to be a lovely party downstairs. Will you let me help you dress? We can go together.’
‘I had a feeling something was happening today.’ She grimaces.
‘It’s also my birthday, Grandma.’
‘How old are you then?’
‘Twenty-seven.’
‘Have you seen my Christmas present?’
‘You’re wearing it. It’s a pretty colour on you.’
She examines her sleeve as if it were covered in bird poo. ‘Not this.’ She stresses this to make her disgust clear. ‘My new photograph.’
The frame sits on her bedside table, beside a plastic jug of water with a matching tumbler in an unfortunate shade of urine-yellow. Almost immediately, my grandmother blocks it from my view, lurching her upper body to the side to try to grab at the photograph with her arthritic fingers. There is a crash, and a cry. ‘Blast! Oh, oh oh!’ She is screaming in frustration.
‘It’s okay. It’s okay.’ I am out of my chair and rushing to the other side of the bed. Water has sloshed everywhere. The jug has bounced onto the linoleum floor.
‘Don’t be upset.’ I am already in her efficient wet room with its accessible shower and toilet and sink, grabbing a vinegar-smelling towel. I retrieve the frame from beneath the bed where it landed, and wrap it in the towel.
‘Is Princess Anne all right?’ my grandmother says.
I can feel my face creasing in puzzlement as I sweep the towel over the floor with a foot. I study the image inside the frame. ‘Oh my God.’
‘Don’t talk that way. You’re a heathen – you cannot be my granddaughter.’
‘But it really is Princess Anne.’
‘Of course it is. Kindly answer my question, please.’ My grandmother makes the words kindly and please sound like insults. ‘I asked if Princess Anne is all right.’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t hear you.’
Her ears are still as sharp as the wolf’s, but I repeat the word. ‘Yes.’
‘No cracks?’
‘Not even a hairline fracture.’ I cannot tear my eyes from the picture, which has been cut from an article that appeared in a local newspaper last September. Three whole months ago. All that time, I was living my poor imitation of a normal life, not knowing this was out there.
Princess Anne’s skirt and jacket are sewn from maroon and navy tartan. My grandmother is wearing her favourite dress. A background of dried earth, sprinkled with flowers the shade of wet mud. This is an adventurous pattern and pallet for my grandmother. Her white wisps of hair look lit from within.
My grandmother is standing, a wooden walking stick shaped like a candy cane in each hand, and care workers on both sides, ready to catch her if she crumbles. I think of my grandmother as tall, but she is stooped and tiny in front of Princess Anne, and looking up at her with a slant eye. My grandmother is not trying to please. My grandmother is never trying to please. Princess Anne bends towards her. The princess’s back is straight and perfect and in line with her neck and head. Only the hinge of her waist moves. The impression is that she is paying homage to my grandmother, rather than the reverse, as you would expect. This is exactly how my grandmother thinks things should be.
My grandmother says, ‘Will Princess Anne be coming to see me again soon, Holly?’ Despite my shock, and my fear, a small part of me registers that at least my grandmother has remembered my name. ‘As soon as she gets a chance, Grandma.’
I am not much of a royal follower. But staring at the photograph, I recall Princess Anne’s visit, and the excitement it occasioned in the residents and staff at the care home. I was working that day, and happy to miss it.
Katarina hurries in, wearing a red Santa hat with a white pom-pom that matches the one she put on my head when I arrived. She has on a tinsel bracelet and necklace, too. ‘Everything okay?’
‘Just a water spill. All dry now.’ I hold out the photograph. ‘How thoughtful,’ I say to Katarina. ‘Is this from you?’
She nods. ‘I think Mrs Lawrence likes it.’
‘She does. That was so kind of you.’ I am trying to seem pleased when I am anything but. But the damage is done. However I seem, it will make no difference now.
There is a tagline beneath the photograph. The Princess Royal talks to Oaks resident Beatrice Lawrence, 93.
It is the sight of my grandmother’s name in print that makes my breath catch in a blend of fear and nausea. All the things I have done. All the measures I have taken. Except for this photograph. This is what I missed. What I didn’t foresee. A tiny thing that might make all the difference. The chance is small, but I know better than anybody that I must prepare for the possibility that this will lead him straight to me.
Then Black Star Sapphire (#uf4e780a2-8b4c-5fb4-85dc-5c4a015474b1)
Two years and eight months earlier
Cornwall, April 2016
The three years since I failed to join MI5 passed slowly, with little to show for them. I spent the time taking care of my grandmother, moving her into a nursing home, and working behind the counter of the town pharmacy that Milly’s father owned.
Everything changed when Milly helped me to get a new job as a ward clerk in the hospital where she worked as a nurse. On my first day, when there was a telephone call for Dr Zachary Hunter, I knew exactly where to find him. The click-clack of his shoes let me track him like the crocodile in Peter Pan.
I hovered in the doorway of a side room, watching Dr Hunter examine a patient whose eyes were closed. The woman’s arm fell from the bed and dangled as he manoeuvred her.
‘Dr Hunter?’ Those were the first words I ever said to him. ‘GP on the phone.’
I felt professional. I felt as if I were starring in a television drama set in a hospital. I felt proud that I was being so helpful. I was extra-diligent. I paid attention to absolutely everything and everyone. Already, I was on top of it all.
Dr Hunter’s back was towards me. Otherwise, I might have seen that he was rolling his eyes in irritation. If he hadn’t been pulling the red triangle above the patient’s bed, so that the siren went off and the lights flashed, I might have heard him swearing under his breath at the idiot new girl.
What I saw, though, when he turned his head, was a calm face, filled with energy and intelligence. What I heard, as he gave me clear, succinct instructions, was an authoritative voice. ‘Dial 2222. Say, “Adult cardiac arrest on the cardiac unit”. Go. Now, Holly. And call me Zac.’
What I thought, as he began chest compressions, was how does he know my name? What I noticed, unable to look away, was that the compressions were a kind of violence. The patient’s white belly flopped from side to side each time he plunged down on her.
‘Go,’ he said again. And, at last, I did.
Afterwards, I said, ‘Sorry about earlier. I’m still learning how it all works.’
He looked at me carefully. ‘It can be overwhelming when you’re new. You’ll learn quickly. And thank you for passing on the message from the GP.’
It was only then that I properly registered that he was entirely bald, though from his face I’d guessed he wasn’t more than forty. I blushed, not simply out of embarrassment for my blundering, but because he had already won me over with his life-saving heroics, his composure under pressure, and his courtesy, which I did not think I deserved.
Although I didn’t get to learn the secrets that working for MI5 would have revealed, I soon understood that the hospital had its secrets too, even if they weren’t of national importance.
There was a young woman, a few years younger than me, waiting for a heart transplant. Over coffee, Zac spoke to me about the case in a hushed voice. ‘I shouldn’t tell you, but I trust you.’ Even as my eyes filled with tears to hear that the young woman would almost certainly die, I was imagining how I would write about her in my journal. Zac touched my hand. ‘Don’t be sad,’ he said. There was a tender side to him, despite the swaggering.
When Zac walked through the ward, the eyes of the patients and their families followed him like a flower follows the sun. Zac was a god there, and he knew it. He didn’t bother to hide the fact that he revelled in his power. Zac saw everything. When he saw that my eyes followed him too, he strutted even more.
My grandmother had told me again and again that my long-dead father was a hero, and I did not doubt it. He was a pilot, flying search and rescue for the Royal Air Force, so he saved many lives. It wasn’t rocket science to see why I would be attracted to a charismatic and commanding older man like Zac, who also saved lives. But self-awareness and self-control are not the same thing. The fact that you know you are acting like a cliché doesn’t necessarily stop you from doing it.
I was sitting behind the reception desk. Zac brushed his shoulder against mine as he looked with me at the computer screen. I was working on the notes for an eighteen-year-old male with a heart infection that his mother knew everything about, but a sexually transmitted disease that she knew nothing about. Zac was making sure that both were being taken care of.
‘Have dinner with me tonight. I’ll cook for you.’ He was so full of pent-up energy he seemed ready to vibrate, but he kept himself still, in control. He was like that whatever he said or did, though he displayed an unflappable cool in all of his interactions with patients.
‘Your glasses are steamed up.’ I noticed because I wanted to sneak a glance at his extraordinary eyes. One was violent blue. The other was the real wonder. It was a half circle of cobalt in the top of the iris, and a half circle of brown in the bottom.
He took the glasses off and handed them to me, an intimacy. ‘Is that a yes to dinner?’
‘I think so.’ I fiddled with his glasses. ‘I don’t have anything to clean them with.’
He looked at his jacket pocket. I fumbled my hand inside, meeting those bright eyes of his as I did, and found a square of grey microfibre covered in tiny stethoscopes. I wiped the lenses. When I handed them back, he let his skin touch mine and gave me an electric shock.
‘You’d better watch for Mr Rowntree’s girlfriend. If she turns up during visiting hours while his wife is here, he may arrest again.’ Zac was smart enough to make sure nobody heard him say this – it was the kind of talk that could get even a doctor in trouble. A piece of my hair had slipped out of my ponytail. He slid it between his fingers as he walked off to do his ward rounds.
Milly came over. ‘You’re looking hot.’
‘It’s extra warm in here.’ I tried to tuck my hair into the elastic.
‘Not that kind of hot.’ She eyed Zac, who was disappearing into the doctors’ office. ‘Nothing says, I’m a very important cardiologist doing super-cool interventional things like a scrub top and smart-casual trousers.’
I laughed so hard I almost snorted, which encouraged Milly to keep going.
‘That I’m looking beautiful but heroics were needed so I threw this top on outfit is definitely for you. I wish I could dress for impact.’ Milly frowned at the purple dress the staff nurses had to wear. ‘It’s like The Handmaid’s fucking Tale around here, with all this fucked-up colour coding.’
Milly and I kept an incognito blog. We called it Angel’s and Devil’s Book Reviews. Devil found the novels that everyone loved and gave them one star. Angel found the ones everyone hated and gave them five. We had two thousand followers and the most beautiful review blog in the world, because Milly was an artist, so everything about it was visually arresting. She was the most creative person I’d ever met. There was a photo on our ‘About Us’ page, with both of us wearing superhero eye masks. Mine was white, Milly’s red. She had scarlet horns pinned to her blonde hair. I had a white halo. Milly’s hatchet job reviews got twenty times more Likes than my attempts at justice for the unfairly spurned.
‘Please tell me you’re not doing Atwood,’ I said.
‘I am for sure going to do Atwood.’
‘You will make her cry.’ I clutched my heart in mock sorrow.
‘She doesn’t strike me as the crying type.’
I looked down at myself. ‘She for sure would if she had to wear this.’
‘True. Those white polka dots.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Dr Hunter seems into them, though. He’d be perfect for you, except for the fact that he sleeps with everything that moves.’
‘If that’s true,’ Zac said, ‘then why haven’t I slept with you?’
Milly let out a squeak.
Zac’s face was a tight mask. How did he manage to sneak up on us? Normally the sound of his shoes gave him away. Did he change his gait, to avoid the usual noise of the taps on his soles? Or were Milly and I so absorbed in each other we didn’t notice? There was no doubting the clip-clop of his walk as he went off to continue his rounds.
Milly wasn’t finished, though she was no longer smiling. ‘It’s so fucking predictable, your falling for this powerful doctor. It’s pure fantasy. We’re not living in my mum’s collection of Disney films. Tell me you at least know that.’
‘I do know, yes. But I also know I’m not alone.’ I hummed a few lines of the Gaston song from Beauty and the Beast, because Gaston was my nickname for Milly’s boyfriend.
‘You have got to stop calling him Gaston,’ she said. ‘Why do you?’
‘You know why. Because he’s so in love with himself. Like the character in the Disney film. They’re practically identical.’
‘That’s true.’
‘Remind me of his real name, Milly.’
‘You’ve known it since our first day of school.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘Tell me the truth about something.’
‘What?’
‘You know that love letter you got when we were in Reception? We thought it was from a boy in our class, but we never figured out who …’
‘We were four. It was twenty years ago, Milly!’
I’d actually written the letter myself. It said, ‘I love you, Holly’, and the words were surrounded by a heart. It was hardly a work of art, though I suppose it was evidence of how much I loved to write and make things up, even at that age. I’d wanted Milly to think I had a secret admirer. I’d experienced a small sense of triumph that I pulled off that bit of fiction and made someone think it was true. Even then, though, I knew that the fact I could fool her didn’t mean I should. I’d felt a twinge of guilt, too, that it had been so easy.
‘Was it Fergus?’ she said. ‘Do you think he wrote the letter?’
‘God. No. I mean, I don’t know, but I’m sure it wasn’t him.’ I still didn’t want to confess to Milly that I’d faked the letter. At the age of four, I was already practising my tradecraft as well as my writing. But my strongest motive for tricking Milly was my wish to impress her. I’d wanted my brand-new friend and neighbour to think that other people saw me as special.
I tried to joke. ‘Gaston probably wasn’t able to write then, so it couldn’t have been him. But you and I were very advanced.’
She laughed. ‘Again true.’
‘I get that you had a crush on him when we were four. I don’t get what you see in him now.’
‘What I see in Fergus is that he’s always been in my life. That kind of loyalty matters.’
‘Not to him. You shouldn’t hold on to someone because they’re a habit.’
‘Why not? I’ve held on to you.’
As a joke a couple of years ago, Milly bought a book that instructed women on all the right things they should do to get a man to fall madly in love with them, and all the wrong things they shouldn’t. She read out bits to me and the two of us hooted in derision.
On my first date with Zac, I did two of the biggest wrong things. The first was that I didn’t make him take me out to dinner. I went to the house he was renting, nestled in farmland and set a few hundred metres from the coastal path.
After weeks of flirting and brushing past each other, his hands were all over me the instant he closed his front door. I said, ‘All those women. Is it true?’
‘Not any more.’ He was unzipping my dress, sliding it off my shoulders, letting it drop to the floor.
The book put the second wrong thing in a different font, for emphasis. Do not sleep with a man on the first date. Never ever. No matter what. Just don’t.
Zac was pulling me towards a rug in the centre of his sitting room, pushing me onto my back, and we were making love almost in the same movement.
When we got up to go to make dinner, he asked how I liked my steak, and I said, ‘Well done, with horseradish sauce.’ He kissed me and sat me at his marble-topped table and told me he would be right back. I heard him climb the stairs, and a minute later, his footsteps drawing near. But instead of returning to the kitchen, there was what I guessed to be the rattle of keys and the creak of the front door opening and closing, then the roar of his car engine.
Half an hour later, I was reading an article that Zac had left the newspaper folded to, which he’d neatly arranged on the corner of the table. The article was about a huge leak of records from a Panama-based law firm, and how the prime minister’s own father was on the list of rich people who put their money in offshore tax havens.
When Zac walked into the kitchen he nodded approvingly at the article. ‘Impressive thing to pull off.’
I took his hand. ‘Whoever leaked that data is a hero.’
‘Doubtful that he’ll appear on the Honours List.’
I stood and pulled Zac against me. ‘I hope they don’t catch him.’
‘I’m glad you feel that way.’ One of his hands was on the small of my back. The other was taking a jar of horseradish sauce from the pocket of his blazer and putting it on the table. ‘I want you to have your dinner exactly how you like it.’ But we ended up not eating anything.
Zac slept with his body pressed against mine that night, and it was the first time I could remember feeling as if I belonged somewhere. When he went into the bathroom the next morning to get ready for work, I listened carefully for the sound of the water running in the shower, then sat up to peek in the drawer of his bedside table.
There was a photograph of a woman who looked like me, with hair the colour of maple leaves in autumn and eyes the colour of moss. She was on a cushiony reclining chair by a beach with palm trees, sipping from a cocktail glass with carefully arranged edible flowers around the rim. She was wearing a tasselled white cover-up, so filmy I could see her orange bikini beneath it. On her left ankle was an oval mark like a black star sapphire, so distinct I wondered if it was a tattoo. Perhaps it was a birthmark.
‘You found my first wife.’ Zac’s voice came as the quilt slipped from my shoulders, or rather, as he pulled it from me, so it was only when those two things, the words and the movement, happened at once, that I inhaled and looked up to see him standing there, though I could hear that the shower was still on.
‘You startled me.’
He sat on the edge of the bed, a towel round his hips. There were drops of water on his shoulders, and he was dripping on me. He drew a wet finger down the centre of my chest and to my belly button, where he left it.
There was no good story to defuse my being caught with the photograph, so I didn’t tell one. ‘She’s very pretty.’ It occurred to me that other than the incident of Peggy and the apple tree when I was four, I had never knowingly been caught snooping.
‘Not as pretty as you.’
‘That was the right thing to say. Was there a second one?’
‘A second what?’ He pressed one hand over my breast and the other over my throat, tilting me flat again.
‘Wife.’
‘The divorce of the first only came through at the start of this year, so not yet.’ His mouth was against mine. ‘The grounds were desertion. She left me.’
‘When?’
‘Three years ago.’
I thought, but didn’t say, that three years ago wasn’t a great time for me either, with Maxine and that glass table and the line I was stupidly ready to cross.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Jane.’ Zac went on. ‘The end of that marriage – it’s the worst thing that ever happened to me. If you know that now, it will help you to understand.’
‘Understand what?’
‘Understand me. The way I am. The care I take, now, to cherish what I value, to make sure I don’t lose it.’
‘The way you are is perfect.’ I pulled him on top of me.
He laughed. ‘That was the right thing to say too. And to do.’
‘Except for the arrogance thing and the god complex thing.’
‘That not so much.’
‘I find it hard to imagine any woman wanting to leave you.’
‘Good recovery. Smoothly done.’ He kissed me into forgetting about his first wife. When I next opened his bedside drawer, the photograph was gone.
Now The Girl with the Two-Coloured Eye (#ulink_ed93efc2-8892-5bcb-8266-60c56b827436)
Three years later
Bath, Monday, 1 April 2019
I am at work, based now in the paediatric unit of a hospital in Bath. This place is so different from my old job in Cornwall. I am concentrating hard on inputting patient details, when the sound of a crying child makes my attention waver.
A woman is in a deep knee bend beside a pushchair, fumbling with a manicured hand to pick up a stuffed kitty that the child must have thrown. One of those women who spends her morning in designer activewear, then transforms into a lady who lunches. Her expensively jewelled fingers are tipped with blue-black manicured nails that for most mothers would not be compatible with a toddler. Those fingers curl around a takeaway coffee cup that she is struggling not to spill.
The child’s small hand shoots out to grab the edge of the woman’s techno-fabric sleeve. Trying to protect the child from the hot drink, the woman loses her balance and falls. The cup lands beside her, the lid pops off, and the steaming coffee splashes onto the linoleum as well as the woman’s blossom-print leggings. The child stops screaming, arrested by the spectacle of her mother on the floor.
‘Can’t she read?’ Trudy, who is the ward manager’s assistant and senior to me, is hissing from behind her computer screen. ‘Tell her. Get out there now, Helen, and tell her about the sign.’
‘Isn’t it a bit late for that?’
‘Go,’ Trudy says.
In my cardiology ward clerk job, I wore a dull-red smock with off-white polka dots. The spots on this paediatric smock are mint green. The background is strawberry-wafer pink. I will look like a walking cupcake as I approach the polished woman.
‘Okay, okay. I’m going.’ I grab the roll of blue paper towels we keep on a nearby shelf for such emergencies, then emerge from the shelter of the curved reception desk.
I squat in front of the woman. ‘You’re not burnt, I hope?’
She shakes her head no.
I offer her some paper towels and she begins to dab at her clothes while I wipe the floor. Trudy has marched across to direct this little scene and glower at the woman. I wouldn’t have imagined that somebody with curlicue hair like Shirley Temple’s could be intimidating, but Trudy is, despite being a mere one and a half metres tall. I know about Shirley Temple because my grandmother loves her, and endlessly watched her films.
‘No hot drinks allowed in Paediatric Outpatients,’ Trudy says. ‘Did you not see the signs?’
The woman stands, elegant and willowy beside Trudy. ‘I’m sorry. I was desperate for caffeine.’
The child is watching all of this with quiet fascination.
‘Children can be scalded by hot drinks. That is why there is a bin by the entrance,’ Trudy says.
‘I was tired,’ the woman says, ‘but that’s no excuse.’
Trudy softens, but to detect the softening you would need to be accustomed to monitoring every gradient of the human anger scale.
‘Come with me,’ Trudy says to the woman. ‘You need to book your daughter in and have her details checked.’
‘Let me grab her first.’ The woman moves towards the front of the pushchair to unfasten the child, who immediately begins to squirm.
‘Helen will watch her for a minute,’ Trudy says.
I am on my knees, mopping coffee. I straighten up, so my shins are resting on linoleum that is printed to resemble a giant jigsaw puzzle, and my bottom is on my heels. The little girl is staring at me, pursing her lips as if she is about to blow out birthday candles. Her hair is the colour of copper, the same shade mine used to be before I soaked it in black dye. It is baby fine, and her mother has arranged the front in a ponytail-spout above her forehead, to keep it out of her eyes. The spout is a white jet, and adorable on this child, though I wonder if her hair colour is a symptom of whatever medical condition has brought her to the paediatric unit today. Her skin is ivory perfect, though perhaps a bit too pale.
I glance at the mum, whose own hair is dark and artfully highlighted. It reaches the bottom of her neck. She pushes it behind her ears and says to me, ‘Is that okay?
‘Absolutely,’ I say, and she follows Trudy.
The child is frowning, uncertain as she scans for her mother, who is now out of her sightline. I expect her to start to cry again, or scream, or kick. But she doesn’t do any of these things. She blinks her eyes several times, so I look more closely at them. They are surrounded by long, red-gold lashes that match my own, though I wear mascara to hide the colour. One eye is four-leaf clover green, again like mine. The other is blue as a dark sky in the top half-circle, and brown as the earth at the bottom. The only other person I have seen with such an eye is Zac. It is one of the most beautiful things about him. Again, though, I wonder if the child’s eye is a symptom of something medical, the same as her white forelock.
I fantasise about picking her up and holding her close, pretending that she is mine.
To others, I must appear to be a normal woman. I alone know that I am a creature stitched out of pieces that don’t fit and never will, with some of them missing and others stretched too thin and in the wrong shape. My seams show vivid and red like those of Frankenstein’s monster.
I say to the child. ‘You are very pretty. What’s your name?’
She opens her mouth, then smacks her lips together.
I laugh. ‘I bet your name is pretty too. Can you tell me how old you are?’
She shakes her head.
‘Let me try to guess. Are you two?’
She holds up one finger.
Her mother speaks over her shoulder to me while Trudy enters more details into the system. ‘Alice will be two next month.’
‘Ah.’ I throw a smile of thanks over my own shoulder. ‘So you are one right now, but nearly two. That is very big. And you’re so clever to count like that.’
She gives me a slow, serious nod of agreement.
‘So you are Alice. I knew you’d have an extra-pretty name. Do you come from Wonderland?’
Alice nods yes to this question and holds out the stuffed kitty, stretching both arms in front of her in one decisive move.
‘For me?’
Another nod.
I take the kitty and jiggle it until she laughs and snatches it back.
‘I love your dress, Alice.’ It is sunburst orange with pink and purple daisies.
Alice points to my head, and I remember that I took the white pom-pom from the Christmas hat Katarina gave me last December and tied it around my ponytail this morning. I touch the ball of fluffy yarn. ‘Do you like it?’
Alice nods, her eyes wide.
Alice’s mum returns, and I show her where she can wait with Alice. It’s the nicest part of the paediatric unit, with PVC-upholstered benches for parents and boxes of toys for children. As soon as she is freed from her buggy, Alice toddles off in her bright play dress to the toy oven, to make pretend cups of tea and bake pretend cakes, helped by her mum, who kneels beside her.
Trudy is preoccupied at the other end of the desk. The buzzer goes, signalling the arrival of a new patient. The last thing on Trudy’s mind is me – she has way too much to do, hitting the button to release the door lock, then signing in a little boy and answering his parents’ anxious questions.
I shouldn’t do it. I know it is irrational. But that eye. I have to check. A few keystrokes, and I have Alice’s computerised records on the screen. The address is on a very expensive street. When I see that her mother’s name is Eliza Wilmot I get an electric shock and my heart starts to beat faster.
Eliza was the name of a woman I glimpsed with Zac in a hotel bar on a horrible night two years ago. I never learned her surname. Is this the same Eliza? And the child. Could she be Zac’s? I shake my head at the possibility, then stop myself, self-conscious, though when I look around nobody is paying attention.
When I see that Alice was born on May eighteenth, just a few days after my own baby, I take a short, sharp breath. My throat tightens, and I am in the grip of grief and panic. There is a real risk I will cry. Last year, on May fourteenth, I pulled the comforter over my head and didn’t get out of bed at all. I think of my grandmother’s photo in the paper. Has Zac managed to find me, and dragged along a child I never knew about? The coincidences are too strong for me to imagine anything else.
I press on through Alice’s referral letter and medical notes. She has type 1 Waardenburg syndrome, which is a rare genetic condition that can cause hearing loss as well as changes to the pigmentation of the skin, hair, and eyes. So far, the medical notes say, Alice has three manifestations of the condition. The white forelock, the iris that is segmented into two different colours, and eyes that appear widely spaced, though in Alice the latter manifestation is so subtle I hadn’t noticed it. She is new to the area, and today is her initial appointment with the paediatrician who will be monitoring her. Tomorrow, I see, she is going to audiology for a hearing test.
For the first time, it occurs to me that Zac might have this condition, too. Could that be why he shaves his head, morning and night, to hide the white forelock? He led me to think the shaving was an aesthetic choice. That he preferred no hair at all to a bald spot. When I asked him about his eye, he said he was made that way. I try to picture his face. I think, though I am not certain, that perhaps his eyes, too, are a little widely spaced. But why would he keep the condition a secret, and try to cover it up, if he did have it? As soon as I silently pose the question, I know the answer. Zac hates anything that makes him appear vulnerable.
A sudden influx of newly arrived parents and children overwhelms me and Trudy. I catch sight of Alice’s mother, hovering nearby, handing Alice a biscuit and a sippy cup, then checking her phone. When the queue has finally cleared, she comes over to me. ‘Thank you so much for your help earlier.’
I give her an it-was-nothing shrug. Does she know who I am? Did Zac send her here? I can’t decide. The appointment is certainly genuine – Alice clearly needs it. I am praying my face isn’t drained of colour when I say, ‘Your daughter is gorgeous.’
‘She is, isn’t she?!’ Without looking at it, she grabs a flyer about MMR from a pile stacked on the counter, rummages in her bag for a pen, scribbles something on the flyer. ‘I’m Eliza. And this is Alice.’
It’s as if I have a hot sword running through the centre of my chest to the bottom of my stomach.
‘And you’re Helen, aren’t you?’ I nearly jump at her knowing my name, but then she lowers her voice and says, ‘The scary woman called you that.’
I manage a laugh. ‘Ah. Yes.’ I lift the flap in the reception counter to let myself through. I crouch in front of Alice. ‘Goodbye, Alice.’ I put out my hand, which she takes and shakes, imitating grown-ups. She holds her arms out, so that I lean closer in, and she giggles and tries to slide my glasses from my nose, then giggles some more. This child looks so like Zac, but his strong features are delicate and beautiful in her face.
‘I don’t normally do this.’ Eliza lifts her shoulders in pretend embarrassment. ‘I mean, pick up new friends in hospital clinics. But we’ve not long moved here, and I barely know anyone. Would you like to meet for coffee? I wrote down my name and number.’ She offers me the MMR sheet.
I take the sheet. ‘Coffee would be lovely.’ It is quiet here, a brief lull, and Trudy has gone on a break. Nobody will notice that I do not dutifully tell my would-be friend Eliza that I am not supposed to do this sort of thing with the parents of patients. I smile with what I think is perfect composure, though the fizzing electrical noises that are a constant in this place seem to be bleeping and pinging from inside my own body.
That night, I cannot sleep. I squirm beneath sheets that are sticky with my own sweat, feeling as alone as a lighthouse keeper trapped on a rock island in a storm so terrible no relief boat can get to him. I grab the phone from the floor by my bed and dial Peggy, with my number blocked and the mute button engaged, my heart beating so much faster than the ringtone.
Peggy is still half-asleep, sounding scared, thinking something has happened to Milly, repeating the word ‘Hello’ over and over, and Milly’s name as if it were a question. I can hear James in the background, asking who it is and what has happened. I disconnect, telling myself it was worth it just to hear their voices after almost two years. I feel dreadful that I’ve frightened them, but tell myself they will soon discover that Milly is fine.
I pull off the quilt and drag myself from the single bed beneath the crypt-like brick archway I’d painted bright yellow. I sit in a rocking chair I’d stained deep teal, and I sew the tiniest of tiny baby clothes for the most premature of premature babies. I am one of a handful of volunteers who make these so that hospitals can keep a few on hand. And though I hope they will never be worn, I know all too well that they will be. I prick my finger with the needle and feel certain that somewhere out in the world a bad thing is happening.
Then Human Asset (#ulink_2cb12b8f-c9a5-59be-b652-55ef34415598)
Two and a half years earlier
Cornwall, 14 October 2016
It was the Mermaid of Zennor who prompted my move into Zac’s rented farmhouse two months after we first slept together. We made the decision when I took him to see her in the village church.
The Mermaid is six centuries old, and carved into the side of a little bench, holding her looking glass and comb. The dark wood is scarred and scratched and discoloured. Some of it is peeling away. She has a rounded belly and breasts that you can’t help but want to touch, though countless hands have smoothed her features away through the years.
Zac and I knelt side by side and trailed our fingers over the Mermaid as I told him her story.
What happens to her is nothing like Hans Christian Andersen’s version or the Disney film. She is enchanted by the beautiful voice of a local man, drifting out of the church towards the waves. And it is the man who then goes to live with her in the kingdom of the Merpeople. She doesn’t need to give up her tail and grow legs to have a life with him on land.
Milly and I had always planned to write a book about her, with my words and her illustrations.
‘You’re my mermaid,’ Zac said, as soon as I finished the story. ‘That is what I want to do for you.’ He knew I would never want to leave Cornwall, though before he met me he’d viewed his job there as a brief stop on his starry route to someplace else. ‘We’ll stay here,’ he said, ‘in your world.’ I was moved by that. And in his debt.
That was four months ago. Since then, we’d spent just three nights apart, when he attended a medical congress in Moldova towards the end of the summer. I’d missed him during that trip, despite the fact that living with a man for the first time wasn’t entirely easy for me. My grandmother brought me up with a strange mixture of regulation that I didn’t miss and freedom that I did. I felt so visible, so watched and accountable, when before I could disappear for what seemed endless stretches of time. But none of that was Zac’s fault.
I’d come to my special place to consider all this. It was where I liked to read and think and scribble hospital stories in my secret journal, which I kept hidden from Zac. I was wearing his parka, hugging it around myself, and sipping from the thermos of coffee I brought with me. The bench that I was sitting on was erected by the town soon after my parents died. The tarnished plaque behind my back was engraved with the words, In Remembrance of Squadron Leader Edward Lawrence and His Wife, Matilda Lawrence.
The bench sat on a section of the coastal path my parents had often walked together, above a gorge in the cliff that made a kind of waterfall down to the rocks below. Usually the waterfall sounded like thunder, and the sea churned and heaved its foam. On that October day, though, the waterfall was a trickle of gentle music, and the sea was so calm I could see the rocks below its glassy surface. Already it was past the high season. There were few other walkers despite the unseasonally mild autumn morning.
It was a short walk to that isolated stretch of the coastal path and I made it whenever I could, as if in my parents’ footsteps. Zac’s rented house was a few hundred metres inland. I thought of my bright charity shop clothes, stuffed in his drawers and wardrobe, mixed with the sleek designer wear he organised with military precision. The tall, narrow house I grew up in next door to Milly and James and Peggy was virtually abandoned, but I understood Zac’s reluctance to live so close to them.
I pictured my childhood bed in the attic, and its bright pink quilt dotted with red poppies. That bed seemed to fade. Instead, I saw the new one I shared with Zac, the white sheets thrown on the floor, and the two of us in it the night before.
My clothes were off, and Zac’s hands seemed to be everywhere, and I reached towards the drawer in the bedside table where I kept my diaphragm, and he caught my arm before I could get to it and pinned my wrists above my head and held me down and kissed any words away, and it was impossible to make him wait any longer, though I was uncertain about whether I wanted him to, and in a haze of confusion over what had just happened, my head foggy from too much wine, and my body seeming not to be my own.
There was a noise, coming from the coastal path, and my replay of the night before blew away. A figure was striding towards me, dressed in baggy walking trousers and a sweatshirt, wearing a small backpack. Her hair was hidden beneath a khaki bush hat, her eyes shielded by dark sunglasses.
I aimed a polite ‘Morning’ vaguely in her direction, hoping that she would walk on and leave me with my thoughts. Instead, she lowered herself onto the bench beside me. Because I had arranged myself in the middle, she seemed too close. I slid over, until my right side was pressed against the wooden arm. I studied the copy of Jane Eyre in my lap, trying to signal that I wasn’t interested in talking.
‘Good book?’ The voice was familiar. I looked up to see the woman remove her sunglasses. There was the same indigo eyeliner, the same thick mascara, the same crimson lipstick. Her hands were gloved, but I was betting the nails were scarlet.
‘Yes.’ It was a present from Zac, a beautiful old edition, given because he knew how much the novel meant to me.
Maxine perched her sunglasses back on her nose, then extracted a clear plastic bag from her backpack, which contained pastries. ‘Croissant?’
I squinted at her. ‘No. Thank you.’
‘Bottle of water?’
‘Again, no. Thank you.’
It had been three and a half years since I crashed out of my final interview for MI5, and her appearance was so unexpected I wondered if I was dreaming. Why on earth was she seeking me out after all that time, and offering me breakfast?
‘I’d like to talk to you.’ She seemed to be answering my unspoken question. She looked out at the sea with her usual indifference and took a bite of a croissant. ‘Stale,’ she said, tossing it behind her without looking.
I stifled a laugh. ‘We had to do a role-play exercise, during that residential assessment. We pretended to be agent handlers making an approach to a potential informant. “Always provide amenities.” That was part of your script for how to recruit an agent. Are you trying to recruit me, Maxine?’
To my astonishment, she said, ‘Yes. I am.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘I’m completely serious. You’re in a position to help us. I’ve come to ask if you will.’
I had fantasised about Maxine seeking me out, Maxine telling me she’d got it wrong, Maxine saying that getting rid of me was the great misjudgement of her career, Maxine confessing that she – that they – needed me.
‘Are you offering me a proper job with the Security Service?’
‘You have access to intelligence that we need, and we know you’re skilful enough to get it for us.’
‘No you don’t. You don’t think that about me at all. I seem to remember that flattery is part of that script for recruiting informants, too.’
‘It is, as a matter of fact. But I do think you’re skilful – there was only that one critical flaw that ended the possibility of your joining us.’
‘Please spare me the flattery. I’d have thought that if you wanted a lab report or a patient’s medical record you could reach right in and grab them.’
‘That isn’t what this is about. But technically speaking, yes, you would be a Covert Human Intelligence Source, or agent – what the cousins call a human asset. I much prefer their term. You already know, Holly, that a human asset collects information for us, then passes it on.’
Her words stabbed away the mad bit of hope I’d somehow conjured. What Maxine wanted – what they wanted – was to use me. I was little more than a drone to them, and would never be properly inside MI5.
‘And you would be my handler?’
‘Yes. I would have responsibility for your security and welfare. Something we take very seriously.’
‘I bet. So you see me the same way you see a drug dealer who gets to stay out of jail if he reports on the bad guys who are above him in the chain. Or a prostitute who you’ll pay if she gives you information about her pimp. Or someone working for a company with trade secrets you’re after.’
‘Those aren’t the only kinds of agents we recruit.’
‘Nice of you to say. I’d be a rubbish informant, and I don’t have access to any intelligence you could possibly be interested in.’ I concentrated on the soft slap of the water as it gently rolled in and out.
‘You have integrity – the qualities that made you want to join us in the first place.’
‘I meant it about skipping the flattery section of your script. You don’t think I have a single atom of integrity. You remember why I bombed my MI5 interview.’
She ignored this unseemly reminder with the tact of a hostess managing an awkward guest. ‘We are authorised to make arrangements of this nature, Holly, in order to detect or prevent a crime, protect national security, or in the interests of the economic well-being of the UK.’
‘Is that some kind of legal document they made you memorise?’
‘Again, you are correct.’
‘What is this really about, Maxine?’
‘Your new boyfriend is Zachary Hunter.’
I was trailing my index finger over the gold lettering on Jane Eyre’s cover, then tracing the edge of the oval portrait of Charlotte between the title and the author’s name. ‘You obviously know that he is.’
‘So you know about his ex-wife?’
‘I know she left him.’ I followed a fishing boat with my eyes, a speck whose ghost-shape outline I could still see, imprinted from when it had been closer to land.
‘Does he know where she is?’
‘Why don’t you ask him?’
‘It’s been tried. The experiment was not successful.’
I shrugged. ‘Well why should he know? The fact that she’s not in his life is pretty normal, given the circumstances. That’s how it is with most people after a relationship ends. Not to mention the fact he divorced her on the grounds of desertion.’
If Maxine were given to expressiveness, I couldn’t help but feel that she would be rolling her eyes. ‘She’s classified as a missing person. Did he tell you that the police questioned him about her disappearance?’
There was a trickle of sweat down my spine. ‘The police always question previous partners. There can’t have been any evidence against him or they’d have charged and tried him.’ Then, the obvious thing, the thing I should have asked first, came to me. ‘Why do you care about this?’
‘I care about a missing woman.’
‘No you don’t. Even if you did, it’s not the kind of thing MI5 gets involved in.’
‘Believe what you like. You know it isn’t protocol for us to explain the reasons for what we do to potential informants with no security clearance. Do you know her name?’
‘Jane.’ I didn’t elaborate on my failure to discover her surname. I’d tried a few Internet searches for her under Zac’s but found nothing. I hadn’t wanted to press him to talk about her, when I could see how painful he found it.
‘Jane Miller,’ Maxine said, as if she guessed that my knowledge was limited. ‘Let me give you some facts.’
‘I don’t want your facts.’
‘Hear me out. Okay?’
I didn’t say yes, but I didn’t stop her, either.
‘Born August fourth, 1980, in London. Raised there by a single mother. Father was American – died in 2008 – Jane never knew him, unless seeing him as a baby counts. The father moved back to the US after Jane’s mother divorced him – their relationship ended before Jane’s first birthday. The mother’s been dead since 1998.’
I couldn’t quell my own curiosity, though I tried to sound bored. ‘What was – is – Jane’s profession?’
‘Social worker.’
‘Maybe she pissed somebody off. Maybe you should be looking at that.’
‘She stopped working a few years before she disappeared.’
‘What was her area?’
‘The elderly – not a speciality where she’d be likely to attract a lot of hate.’
‘You didn’t tell me the names of her parents.’ I pulled Jane Eyre closer, across my tummy, as if to shield myself.
‘Jane’s mother was Isabelle Miller. Her father was Philip Veliko. Philip remarried soon after he returned to the US and had a son with his new wife. Frederick.’
‘Would the father’s new family have reason to resent Jane?’
‘Jane inherited some money from her father, but the second wife predeceased him and Frederick didn’t dispute Jane’s inheritance – everything was split equally between Frederick and Jane. No known grievances or hostile behaviour from any of them.’
‘Was Jane in contact with her brother?’ Jane Eyre rose and fell as I breathed.
‘As far as we can tell, only after their father’s death, not before.’
‘Well, you should still look at the brother. Most people would be pretty pissed off if some sibling they didn’t even know swanned in and took half their inheritance.’
‘Listen to me, Holly. Jane Miller is like you. And like your friend in the book.’ Briefly, lightly, she tapped Jane Eyre with a gloved finger. ‘She found herself living with a man whose closets were filled with skeletons. And she found, in the end, that she had to look in them. You are already living the perfect cover story. You don’t need to change a thing.’
Round and round my finger went. ‘My life isn’t a cover story. My life is my life. My life is real.’ I shook my head. ‘Normally, you ask someone inside a government organisation to betray their country in some way. In my case, you want me to betray my boyfriend, be an informant on my boyfriend. No way. Not happening.’
‘There are countless kinds of intelligence targets. You know that. We want any information that can help us find Jane and make sure she’s safe.’
‘Zac doesn’t make women unsafe. Zac saves people’s lives. Besides which, making sure women are safe is not your core business.’
‘Our core business is complicated.’
‘Then perhaps you should try explaining it in more detail to your potential agents. You might find they’d cooperate more enthusiastically.’
‘You’re a little different than most, more informed than is typical, given your history with us. I’m telling you everything I can. More than usual.’
‘Flattering and confiding all in one move – you’re a master of that recruitment script, but it’s not working. Zac wouldn’t hurt anybody. He’s the most loving, protective, generous man I’ve ever known.’
‘That’s a lot of adjectives.’
‘I don’t need you to critique my language. I finished my English degree.’
‘If you’re right about him, then looking more closely can only show that.’
I put Jane Eyre in my bag, out of her sight and reach. ‘Why on earth would I do this for you? What are you even trying to buy me with? I know you normally think of incentives when you’re recruiting an agent. What possible incentive would I have?’
She allowed herself a smile. ‘Ideological, in your case. I won’t patronise you by not admitting that. It’s your value system. You’d be protecting other women. Helping Jane. As I said, you’d be helping Zac, too.’
‘He wouldn’t see it that way. This is a wasted journey for you. There is no way I will do this.’
‘Look. Here’s another incentive for you, but maybe one that isn’t so easy for you to admit. I’m talking about your curiosity. You are Pandora, Holly. It’s in your blood, that impulse to look where you shouldn’t. My guess is that you’ve continued to do it, even without the legitimacy that the job would have given you.’
She was right, but I wasn’t about to admit it to her. ‘I’m not going to spy on Zac. Not for anybody and certainly not for you.’
‘If he’s telling you the truth, you’ve nothing to lose. You’d be helping him, removing him from suspicion. If you’re wrong, wouldn’t it be better for you to know it? Because if you are wrong, you may be living with a modern-day Bluebeard.’
I shook my head, trying to use reason to fight the tightening in my stomach. ‘It doesn’t make sense. This isn’t the kind of thing the Security Service involves itself in. We aren’t talking about national security, here. What aren’t you telling me?’
‘We work extremely closely with the police on many operations and investigations.’
‘That’s empty rhetoric and you know it.’
‘Do you know what Jane looks like?’
I thought again of the photograph I found of her on the first night I slept with Zac. I’d searched for it several times since, without luck. ‘Yes.’
‘Then you know you resemble her. Same height and build – you’re a couple of centimetres taller, but not much. Same colouring, that unusual strawberry blonde hair you both have. Doesn’t that disturb you?’
‘Having a preferred type isn’t a sign that a man’s a psychopath and a murderer.’
‘Holly. I need to ask if Zac has ever done anything to hurt you.’
‘Of course not.’ I tugged Zac’s parka down at the wrists. They were slightly red and swollen, from where he’d pinned them above my head the previous night, one of those fine lines that you sometimes crossed during sex, when you were carried away. ‘But despite the fact you obviously disagree, rather than rescue me from him you want to send me back in.’
‘I’m confident there’s nothing I can say or do right now to keep you away from him. You don’t want to be rescued. So, given that this is where we find ourselves, it would help us a great deal if you would keep an eye out.’
‘No.’
‘You don’t need to do much. We can start small. If you come across any objects of Jane’s, tell us about them in as much detail as you can. Give them to us, if at all possible.’
‘It’s pointless. Not just because I said no and I mean it. Zac doesn’t even have any of her things.’
‘You might still stumble on something. We’d like to know of any communications Zac makes, especially if they are connected in any way to Jane. Who are his contacts? How does he get in touch with them? Email? Text? Phone? Laptop? Does he have any social media accounts? Maybe under a user name that people wouldn’t link to him? What trips does he make? If he ever happens to leave a device powered on you might be able to look. See if you can guess his password. Pay attention to where he’s going, who he’s meeting, if anyone ever visits him at work …’
‘Those are disgusting things to do to someone you care about, someone who’s trusted you and let you into their life.’
‘Do what you are comfortable with, then. What you can. You understand Zac. You’re intimate with him. You see the ins and outs of how he operates in ways we can’t.’
‘The answer’s no.’
‘It won’t kill you to think about it, and to be gently watchful while you do.’
‘Again … no.’
‘Let me ask you something.’
‘What?’
‘Did you ever tell Zac you tried to join us?’
‘No. Why would I?’ My voice cracked. ‘It was humiliating. Do you ever consider what it means to someone to work so hard to try to join you, to want to devote herself to that, to protecting her country, and then to discover she’s not good enough?’ I was surprised by my own honesty, by my nakedness and exposure.
‘I do. And it was wise of you to keep it to yourself. Did you tell anyone else?’
‘Only Milly and James and Peggy. As I disclosed when I applied.’
‘Again wise – I suggest you keep it that way. But just in case you change your mind about doing this for us, let me explain a bit more about how it can work.’
‘I’m not going to change my mind. I’ve said no so many times in the last few minutes I’ve lost count. No means no these days.’
‘I know that. I respect that. But it won’t hurt you to hear me out. It doesn’t obligate you to do anything. I’ve come a long way to see you – you can at least listen.’
‘I don’t remember guilt and emotional blackmail as part of the recruitment script.’
‘Well they are. Can you give me a few more minutes?’
All I gave her was a shrug, but she seized on it with a pleased nod.
‘Good,’ she said, and though I punctuated her sentences with shakes of my head, she told me that my identity would be protected, and that any written records would not be available except to a small number of those who needed access, and that any information about my own wrongdoing would not be acted upon.
‘There is no wrongdoing. Because I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘We know that.’ But still she went on, telling me about the secret channels through which I could contact her to pass information. And I couldn’t help but listen, because the tradecraft she was describing, the basic techniques for surveillance and communications, fascinated me too much to stop her altogether or simply leave. She told me how to speak through classified advertisements, and about a dead letter drop she would set up near the bench where we were sitting. She mentioned a safe house, in case I ever needed to get away quickly.
‘You really have wasted your time and wasted your breath,’ I said, when she finally stopped.
‘We’ll see.’ Without another word, she got up to retrace her steps along the path, vanishing as suddenly as she appeared. She moved silently, and I realised that the rustle she’d made when she first approached was no accident. Nothing Maxine said or did ever was.
Now The Two Tunnels (#ulink_3a00187c-bf53-56db-8d29-39e566219c83)
Two and a half years later
Bath, Tuesday, 2 April 2019
My head is filled with the little girl who visited the hospital yesterday. Each time I try to explain away her appearance there, I fail. I look over my shoulder, half-expecting to see Zac.
I am on my morning run. The route is already in my bones. My body moves along it without effort, though I barely slept last night. Hearing Peggy and James’s voices comforted me, but agitated me too. For so long, I have had to hide myself from the few people in the world I love, all the time fearing that Zac would turn up. Now, there is a high probability that he has, as well as the distinct possibility that he dragged a wife and child along with him.
But I am not going to sit around waiting for them to pop out at me again. Or for him to. I added Eliza to my telephone contacts last night. ‘Madam likes to be up early,’ she had said, ‘and my husband’s usually out before the sun, so call any time.’ I grab my phone from the pocket in the waistband of my leggings and use a voice command to do just that.
As we speak, Eliza clatters breakfast things and tries not to sound stressed, while Alice chatters in the background. We arrange to meet in the park for a quick coffee tomorrow morning, before I go into work. ‘Getting Alice out early into fresh air would be good,’ she says. There is a screech from Alice, and a crash of what sounds like glass onto tiles. ‘As you can hear.’ Eliza breaks off, though she hurriedly promises to bring the coffees.
I put the phone away and speed up. The sun is cutting through the pre-dawn mist and the bluebells are out already. Despite the two miles I have already run, and the call, I am not at all out of breath. I had to work hard to get this strong after it happened.
I turn into the disused railway line, going faster still, then enter the first tunnel. The dimness swallows me. The air seems still and dead, and smells of damp. Soon, though, the motion sensors begin, the flashes and sounds activated by my movement – Milly would love this. A circle of blue light surrounded by a white halo blazes at me from a window-shaped cut-out in the wall of stone, then a blast of violin music that is louder than my breathing as I speed up. But the tunnel is filled with ghosts, as if Eliza and Alice brought them along to the hospital and released them to chase after me.
I emerge into fresh, cool air, and the song of birds. There is the magic glimpse of a kingfisher in the gap between the two tunnels, by the river below. After the one that froze here last Christmas, I want so badly to take it as a good sign, but can’t bring myself to.
I enter the second tunnel, leaving the sunshine behind me again. When I come out the other end, I think of a baby’s first breaths, gasped in the midst of all that new brightness and noise. I try to envisage a baby’s birth as it should be, because the bad outcomes are the exceptions and it is important to keep that in mind.
‘Helen.’
I halt as if somebody has jerked me backwards. I know that voice, but I blink several times, as if to be sure of what I am seeing.
There is no doubt. The woman standing before me has stepped straight out of my nightmares.
It’s not the right time yet. Getting you out the right way will take time. We need to set things up properly.
It has been almost two years since I’ve seen her, and Zac is a better candidate for the starring role in my bad dreams. But Maxine is the one who comes to me in the night, just as she did on my last night in hospital, the sheets clinging, cold and damp from my sweat.
Maxine has this way of never seeming to look at anyone or anything, her eyes downcast, her shoulders rounded. She is droopy. That is the word I often think of when I observe her. Your eyes would slide over her as if she were the most uninteresting piece of grey furniture ever made. And that is exactly what she wants your eyes to do.
‘It’s good,’ she says, ‘how readily you respond to Helen. Presumably Graham is natural to you too, now?’
‘Yes.’ I hadn’t been out of breath, but now I am.
Maxine’s blouse is elegant in midnight-blue silk, but untucked and sloppy. Her loose black trousers disguise how slim and dangerously fit she is. She is slouchy, as ever. Only the unfortunate know what it means when she straightens her back, something she does rarely. I am one of that select group.
‘You look different.’ That flat flat flatness of her voice. The pretence of indifference, as if I am a neighbour she sees every day, walking up and down the path to the next-door house.
‘That’s hardly surprising.’
Time seems to spool backwards, speeding past her twilight swoop on me in the hospital almost two years ago – it’s too painful to freeze time there. It rushes further back, past her ambush on the cliffs two and a half years ago. Time stops six years ago, on the day I flunked out, sitting in that white-light room with the exposing glass table between us.
You’re like that puppy who was too friendly to be a police dog, she’d said. We don’t recruit good-looking people. You need to look like Jane Average, but you’re too vain to let yourself look that way.
She has left the rear door of the car open, the engine purring but the driver invisible behind dark windows and hidden by the partition that keeps his section of the car separate. We both know it is no accident that she has crossed my path. Nothing is ever an accident with Maxine.
‘Why are you here?’ I channel her flat indifference, though I am pretty sure I can guess. As repellent as she is to me, it is looking as though I am going to need her help.
‘Have you done anything to give yourself away?’
The question is a confirmation more than a surprise, but the air still puffs out of my stomach. ‘My grandmother …’ My voice trails off. ‘It’s possible, yes.’
She starts towards the car, parked where the road ends and the tunnel opens. ‘Come with me.’ It is as if I’d seen her yesterday, to hear her boss me around.
‘Are you having me watched? Is that how you found me this morning?’
‘Not necessary. You seem to have forgotten that I already knew where you were.’ Do I imagine that there is a flash of something behind her eyes? Maxine opens the car door. ‘There’s something I need you to see. It’s for your protection.’
‘Excuse me if my confidence in your ability to protect me isn’t great.’
‘It’s not as if you have anywhere important to go. Or anyone to go to.’
I say nothing. I keep my face indifferent, channelling Maxine herself. But she is right. Other than my grandmother, there is nobody.
‘Trust me,’ Maxine says.
‘I’ve tried that before. It didn’t work out great.’
‘As far as I can tell, it still hasn’t.’
‘Do you have children, Maxine?’
She pretends not to hear.
‘I asked you a question.’
‘If I answer, will you come?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have children.’
‘How many?’
‘I agreed to answer your first question, not a series of them.’
‘How many?’ I say again.
‘Two.’ She looks so sorry for me. ‘I have two.’
Then The Plague Pit (#ulink_dc36fb12-be2e-58aa-8365-b4b474d2963b)
Two years and five months earlier
Cornwall, 13 November 2016
Since Maxine’s failed attempt to recruit me four weeks ago, I’d plugged Jane’s name, and her mother’s and father’s and brother’s, into every Internet search engine I could think of. There was no social media for any of them, though I found a record of Jane’s birth in London on 4 August 1980 and her marriage to Zac in September 2006.
I also found her father’s obituary, which confirmed what Maxine said about his wife pre-deceasing him and his son Frederick surviving him. Two other things struck me when I read it. First, that Philip Veliko had been a property developer, and second, that the obituary didn’t mention Jane at all.
The Remembrance Sunday ceremony always started at the outdoor war memorial in the square, then moved into the church. I was getting ready to leave for this, twisting up the front of my hair and fastening it with a jade comb, when Zac slipped his hands beneath my knitted dress. Before I knew it, he was tipping me back onto the bed and I was pulling him on top of me and there was a pile of sea-green wool on the floor.
Afterwards, when I stood in front of the looking glass to try again with my hair, he pressed against me from behind, wrapped his arms around me, and rested his hands on my belly. He whispered that he knew my period was two weeks late and my breasts were bigger, which he loved. I wondered that he could know these things, that he could be watching my body that carefully.
I had loved my brief time of hugging the secret of a pregnancy close and just for me. My breasts had been tingling for the past few days. Little electric sparks shot through them. I’d planned to share the news with him tomorrow, on his birthday.
So I said my period had a tendency to skip around, and my breasts were the same as ever, and it was too early to tell, and he smiled at our reflections and said, ‘Then we will see.’
When Zac and I arrived at the war memorial, we found Peggy and James waiting for us close to the Cross of Sacrifice. Peggy invariably got there early on Remembrance Sunday, because she liked to have a good view of the ceremony. She was resplendent in a white fur Cossack hat and scarlet coat.
Zac put his mouth by my ear. ‘She looks like a giant poppy,’ he said, and I nearly sprayed the mouthful of the takeaway coffee I’d just sipped.
James stood beside Peggy, his silver hair sticking up, straight-backed as ever in his black greatcoat and red scarf. He was his usual quiet self, and gave me his usual kiss on the cheek with his usual near-smile, and made his usual half-joke that he was still waiting for me to come back to the pharmacy to work for him again. Peggy put on a display of exaggerated patience as she allowed James to finish, then threw her arms around me.
Zac reached into his coat pocket and produced a wooden cross. Two names were already written on it, in his precise, perfectly controlled lettering. Edward Lawrence, RAF. Matilda Lawrence.
‘You are lovely.’ I put a hand to his cheek. ‘Thank you.’
‘That was thoughtful.’ Peggy tried to smile at Zac but managed only a stiff movement of the upper corners of her mouth. She beamed warmth democratically on everyone – waiters, people behind supermarket tills, neighbours. Zac was the one person for whom she could muster nothing more than cold politeness.
Zac guided me to the Cross of Sacrifice, and I knelt to place the small cross at its base, among the others, before I rose and stepped backwards.
‘What was his rank?’ Zac asked.
‘Squadron Leader. He was a commissioned officer, but he wasn’t born into it. He grew up on my grandparents’ dairy farm. He was young when he died. Thirty-three. They both were. Did I tell you he flew search and rescue helicopters?’
‘You did. You should be very proud.’
As I honoured my military father and civilian mother, I thought of my grandmother, and what she constantly said about my parents’ deaths. She, of course, had a conspiracy theory, and believed that the car accident that killed them wasn’t an accident at all but made to look like one because my father knew something he shouldn’t. Whenever she dropped her dark hints I tried to quiz her, only for her to clam up. Sometimes, I thought my obsession with joining the Security Service was driven by my wish to get access to whatever hidden information there might be about this. I remembered Maxine’s seemingly innocuous questions about their deaths during that awful interview.
Zac put an arm around me, and we slowly walked the few metres to join Peggy and James. Peggy said, ‘So you’re living above the plague pit, Zac?’
He looked bewildered, which was not a look Zac often wore.
‘Didn’t Holly tell you?’ Peggy said.
‘No.’ He managed a joke. ‘I ought to ask for a discount on the rent.’ He turned to me, as if for help. ‘Holly?’
‘It’s just a story,’ I said.
‘You know it isn’t,’ Peggy said.
‘Are you going to tell me?’ Zac’s eyes were glittering at mine.
‘Hmm. I’m thinking I have to say yes to that.’ So I began. ‘In the mid-fifteenth century, five hundred people from the town were lost to the plague. The burial records for that period don’t survive, and the plague victims aren’t in the graveyard.’ A paper poppy petal, torn away from the body of the flower, floated above us, lifted by the wind. ‘So here is the question. Where were the poor souls put?’
‘Souls?’ Zac raised an eyebrow.
‘The thinking is that the bodies were loaded onto carts and taken along the coffin path. Then they were dumped into a pit. This was three kilometres along the coast, but slightly inland.’
‘Where you are.’ Peggy was fingering the cross that dangled from a silvery chain around her neck. ‘To rid the town of contagion.’ She glanced up at the smoky-blue sky, as if for heavenly support. ‘The pit is on the land behind your farmhouse. Your back garden, as a matter of fact. Nobody wants to live there. It’s supposed to be unlucky.’
‘Sounds like a load of superstitious …’ Zac paused to find a more polite term than whatever he’d been about to say. ‘It’s as likely as mermaids.’
Peggy’s eyes narrowed. Her nostrils flared. To Peggy, an accusation of superstition was as bad as one of devil worship.
‘You know that mermaids are real.’ I was trying to tease the tension away. ‘I told you. You can’t live in St Ives and not believe in mermaids.’
‘True.’ He pulled my head against his chest. We were both thinking of the rough-hewn and time-scarred Mermaid Bench, the two of us holding hands as we knelt by the Mermaid in a kind of pledge to each other and to her.
‘Holly’s our little Ariel,’ Peggy said.
Zac gave me some serious side-eye at this Disneyfication. I squeezed his hand, trying to communicate silent understanding as well as a plea for him not to start on a critique of the ‘sugary sentimentalism’ that he detested.
I smiled at Peggy. I knew that she was picturing me and Milly, still tiny girls in pink nightdresses, snuggled against her during one of our countless sleepovers, the three of us eating popcorn and watching the Disney video.
There was room in the world for all kinds of mermaids.
Milly was gesturing for me to join her near the open church door, where she was standing by Gaston, whose hair was slicked into a ponytail. He broke up with her a few months ago, but Milly couldn’t get over it. She continued to sleep with him, and whenever they had sex it gave her false hope that he’d changed his mind.
As I looked at Gaston, I was again struck by how strongly he resembled the character from the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, which was another of the films that Milly and I watched with Peggy when we were children. That one was our favourite, because Belle was a passionate reader, like me and Milly.
Again Milly was beckoning me, this time even more frantically, but I shook my head no, not wanting to leave Zac when he was so palpably uncomfortable.
‘Milly needs you, sweetheart.’ Peggy was tugging at my arm. I looked helplessly at Zac as Peggy prised my hand out of his, deliberately ignoring the don’t-you-dare-leave-me-with-them look he was shooting at me. She gave me a push towards Milly that practically sent me flying.
Milly was in tight jeans and sheepskin boots, a cream beanie hat covering her bright hair, seeming to know everyone, kissing old and young alike but making sure all the time that she kept within a metre of Gaston.
I took a lock of her hair between my fingers, to peel off the purple acrylic gloop that had dried on it. ‘You’ve found some time to paint this morning?’
She was glowing when she nodded yes. ‘At last. I got up early.’ She was so beautiful and cleverly funny that almost every man I ever met would want to go out with her. But she didn’t seem to know this.
‘I’m glad.’ I noticed Zac, pushing through the crowd to get to me.
‘Hi, Holly Dolly.’ Gaston’s voice was so booming that Zac sent a look his way that would vaporise other mortal beings.
‘Hello, Gaston.’ At least nobody could say I only used the name behind his back. Milly had given up on trying to stop me. I’d known since we were four that he would hurt her. Now that he actually had, I wanted to punch him in his rock-hard gut.
‘You know I consider that name a compliment, don’t you?’ He insisted on kissing me on the cheek, nearly choking me with his aftershave. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t love me.’
‘I really don’t.’
Zac had reached me at last, and curled an arm tightly around my waist, pulling me close to his side. The gulls were wheeling above our heads.
‘The parade’s about to start, Holly.’ He aimed us in the direction of the War Memorial, but the crowd had grown so thick we couldn’t get close to Peggy and James. ‘I came here to support you, and you repay me by sneaking off to Milly and her boyfriend.’
‘Ex-boyfriend, now.’
‘I don’t care who he is.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t sneak, I don’t need to pay you, I didn’t mean to upset you, and I can promise you that talking to Gaston is not fun.’
‘Gaston? I hate those Disney names. You’re too intelligent for that.’
The increasing decibel level as the marching band approached saved me from the need to say more, because the outdoor part of the ceremony was finally underway, and the buglers were sounding.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old …
My voice joined with the others, and I could feel Zac’s irritation melting away. He encased both of my hands inside his, and kept them that way through the two-minute silence.
As we walked from the outdoor memorial to the church that towered over it, he whispered, ‘I’m sorry, Holly. I feel left out, sometimes, of your life here. You’re such a part of things.’
‘You are too.’
‘Am I?’
‘Of course. It matters to me that you want to live here. I know you’re doing it for me. I’m moved by that.’
We processed into the packed church together, and slipped into a pew at the rear. The pillars were garlanded in ribbons that had been strung with poppies. Zac did not bow his head for prayers or recite the Act of Penitence or sing any of the hymns, and certainly not ‘God Save the Queen’.
After the service, he held my hand as we joined the parade, following the band and swinging our arms back and forth to ‘The British Grenadiers’. Zac sang along, and I loved that he knew every word. We were at the tail end, and when I finally glimpsed Milly and Peggy and James again, they were getting further and further ahead as we processed through the town.
I tugged at Zac’s arm, smiling. ‘Shall we catch them up?’
It was as if I had flicked a switch, turning him from happy to sad. ‘Don’t you want to be with me?’
‘Forever.’
‘The three of them are a family. It’s the two of us now.’ He smiled. ‘Or three. Yes?’ He put a hand on my tummy. ‘We’re making our own family. Aren’t we?’
‘Yes.’ I smiled up at him. When I broke his gaze, I realised that I had lost sight of my best friend and my surrogate parents. As far long as I could remember, I had walked with them, and until the last few years, with my grandmother too, claiming James’s arm during the Remembrance Sunday commemorations that St Ives did so beautifully.
‘Doesn’t that make you happy?’
‘Yes.’ I nodded to confirm it. ‘That’s a lovely thing. Yes.’ It was what I had always wanted. And I could see he was right about my not being a part of the family of three that was Peggy and James and Milly. But to be without them in that place, on that day, was like having a piece of myself cut away.
Now The Backwards House (#ulink_8b3250e7-5818-5e0b-8b57-2488b519910f)
Two years and five months later
Bath, Tuesday, 2 April 2019
The country lane that Maxine’s driver is speeding along is lined with golden daffodils. They flutter and dance and twinkle on their green banks in exactly the way Wordsworth said.
I have the sense that Maxine is watching me, though she is slumped against the cream-coloured leather car seat and seeming to look at her own lap, where her hands are resting. Her nails, as usual, are long and perfectly manicured. The polish is what my grandmother calls dragon-lady red, and matches Maxine’s lipstick. I have never seen a chip in that polish.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Not far.’ She answers like a parent. Or at least how I think parents answer, because my own have been dead for too long for me to know this from experience, and I am not a parent myself, however much I try to tell myself that she counted and I am.
The car enters a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Bath. Because the houses here are built on top of old quarries, they get alarming cracks from subsidence, so walls split and ceilings buckle, hurling dark-grey plaster dust and chunks of building into the rooms.
Maxine’s driver turns onto a street that is filled with police cars and vans, all clustered near a modern, brick, perfectly square end-of-terrace house. The house is surrounded by police tape. ‘Come on,’ Maxine says, and I follow her out of the car.
I stand a couple metres away as Maxine speaks to a tall man with dark hair and dark-rimmed glasses, wearing a dark suit and standing outside of the cordon. He looks like the prince of death as he peers at me. I decide he is more likely to be MI5 than police as he nods at Maxine and says, ‘Tess’s up there. She’s expecting you.’
Maxine moves her head to signal that we need to go into the tent that encloses the house’s front door. The door has an awning with a strange coating of artificial grass. We are given forensic suits, so that our hair is obscured by white hoods, our mouths and noses covered by white masks, and our shoes enveloped in white footwear protectors. I want to hesitate, but I don’t let myself. Maxine marches into the house, and I march after her.
‘Don’t touch or move anything,’ she tells me, without turning round.
The carpet inside the entryway is mink-grey and I can see the tracks left by the vacuum, despite the ghost-shapes of old spills that no amount of shampoo will remove. The air is scented with pine and lemon, and window cleaner, plus the lingering hint of something that makes my stomach clench because it reminds me of Zac’s soap.
‘The burglar alarm wasn’t tripped,’ Maxine says. ‘She either de-activated it to let someone in, or didn’t activate it in the first place. Good chance she knew them.’
‘She. Who is she?’
Maxine is making a performance of looking around too attentively to notice that I have spoken.
The house seems the wrong way round, with the sitting room at the back, spanning the building’s entire width. There are no books on the shelves of the fake wood bookcases, and no dust either. There is a single half-drunk cup of strong black tea on the cheap glass coffee table. Not many people drink their tea with no milk. I’ve known two, and though Milly likes hers weak, and Zac strong, it came as a surprise that she and Zac should share anything other than their mutual hatred.
The kitchen is to the left side of the entry hall. It is also pristinely clean, though far from luxurious with peeling laminate cupboards, a half-size fridge like my own, and cork flooring.
At the bottom of the stairs is a handbag, stiff and upright, the obvious item in any game of odd one out. Tan leather, shiny gold hardware, and the Hermès logo in its cleanly embossed capital letters. Only once before have I come across a designer bag of this ilk.
Maxine answers one of the many questions I haven’t voiced. ‘It was a two-month holiday let, paid by credit card. They haven’t traced the holder of the card, but it didn’t belong to the woman who was occupying the house. She moved in a week ago – used a false name.’
We crunch our way up the stairs, along a roll of white paper. I can see on either side of it that the stairs have been sanded and painted.
At the top of the landing, straight in front of us, is an open bedroom door. A tall woman in another moon suit, glasses peeping out of her otherwise-covered face, emerges and squeezes onto the landing with us. ‘Hey, Maxine,’ the woman says.
‘Hey, Tess.’ It isn’t the forensic drama that brings home the fact that I am being allowed to see another version of Maxine, who is not slouching. It is Maxine’s use of the word ‘Hey’ and its attendant chumminess.
‘Needless to say,’ says Tess, ‘don’t touch anything.’
‘Sure thing,’ Maxine says, in more of the new Maxine language.
Tess does not ask who I am when she motions for us to follow her. There is a frizz of grey hair on her temple, which has escaped the head covering. There are smile lines around her eyes, and my guess is that in the part of her life that doesn’t involve space suits and corpses, this woman is restrainedly contented, with wry good humour.
Instead of moving forward when Tess beckons, though, I freeze. My head is telling me to go in, but my body does not seem to want to.
I’d thought the sweat had dried on me in Maxine’s car after my run, but I am wet again, beneath my breasts, down my spine. The mask over my mouth is stopping me from breathing. My scalp is itchy and hot beneath the hood.
Maxine puts a hand on my shoulder. The last time she did that I practically chopped it off. She says, ‘You don’t know the strength of a person until they’ve been tested.’
I nearly say, No shit, Sherlock, which is one of Milly’s favourite expressions. Milly loves the word shit. Instead, I manage a more restrained, ‘Thanks for your wisdom,’ and for the first time in forever, Maxine visibly blanches.
Then The Forgotten Things (#ulink_5fb9ec71-17a1-50aa-8e2d-a4aa6c2e6598)
Two years and four months earlier
Cornwall, Mid-December 2016
Zac left for London early this morning for a British Cardiovascular Society symposium. Tomorrow he will fly to the Ukraine for a fleeting visit, to do some teaching in a hospital in Kiev. Before he drove away, I leaned into the open car window for a final kiss goodbye, my hair unbrushed and circles under my eyes after a night of endlessly being sick.
I watched the car disappear out of sight, fantasising that I would get out my journal and write. Instead, I wandered through the house nibbling a special ginger biscuit that was supposed to help with nausea but was proving useless. I was ten weeks pregnant but the sickness wasn’t getting any better.
Zac hated clutter, but this place was decorated in a romantic style that seemed to invite it. The personal things were all mine – the cardigan thrown over the cabbage roses sofa, the pregnancy magazines covering the distressed coffee table, the pot of lip gloss and ponytail holder on the white-painted chimney piece, the novels on the chintz armchair. Zac was constantly putting them away, then scrubbing the artificially aged surfaces with disinfectant wipes. I was trying to be more orderly, because it was painful to see him so unnerved by what he would call mess and I would call the ordinary chaos of human life.
Since Maxine’s ambush on the cliffs two months earlier, I’d stepped up my efforts to search the house for some sign of Jane. I poked my fingers into the toes of Zac’s socks when I tossed the clean pairs into the drawer. I ran my hand under the mattress when I made the bed. I examined the seams of his suits when I hung up his shirts from the dry cleaners. I checked his books as I dusted, to see if any were mere shells with cavities for hiding things. So far, I had found nothing. His taste in books, all hardbacks and dust-free, was unsurprising – medical ethics, law, artificial intelligence, and the surveillance state. He especially liked it when these subjects intersected. His current book at bedtime was about the use of technology by a group of anonymous hackers to promote political and social change.
As I closed the lid of a shoebox that lived in his wardrobe – it contained a pair of unworn black Oxfords – I had a flash of Zac loading a new carbon-fibre suitcase onto the passenger seat of his sports car. Everybody saved their old suitcases for packing stuff when they moved, didn’t they? Before I had finished this thought I was rushing down the stairs to the cupboard that runs beneath them.
My own suitcases were towards the front. I’d used them to transport my stuff from what I referred to as the brown house. My attic bedroom, with walls that I’d painted all the colours of the rainbow, was the one exception to the law of brown. The rest of the house was filled with brown carpets that my grandmother vacuumed every day, brown tapestry curtains that I was always opening and she was always closing, and brown sofas covered in bobbled brown blankets that I was always tearing off and she was always putting back. ‘I don’t want my fine furniture destroyed by the sun,’ my grandmother would say.
I actually felt a kind of nostalgic affection for the brown house as I started to drag my suitcases from the cupboard beneath Zac’s stairs, sliding and pulling them into the wide hallway behind me.
I couldn’t help but smile at my grandmother’s blue vinyl train case, which was like seeing an old friend. When I once expressed surprise at the pretty colour, she told me my grandfather bought it for her. ‘Horribly impractical. See how it scuffs,’ she said. But she looked at it with reluctant affection. After all, she’d brought it from their farm to my parents’ house when she moved in to look after me. I in turn brought it to Zac’s, stuffed with my bathroom things and make-up.
It wouldn’t occur to Zac that I’d enter this dank and dusty place, which he avoided, given the germs that must infest it. I had to crawl inside to reach the final suitcases. They were old, made of tan canvas and trimmed with tan fake leather in the corners. The larger of the two was too bulky and heavy to comply with today’s airline specifications.
I shone my phone torch over them. Flimsy padlocks linked the zippers. I lifted each of the identification tags. Zac had written his name on both. He’d probably dragged them around the continent during his gap year grand tour, and kept them out of nostalgic fondness.
I tugged Zac’s clunky things into the hall, then unfastened my grandmother’s train case. Tucked within a silky stretch pocket on its topside was a snap-closing coin purse filled with tiny keys for old suitcase locks. The purse – quilted fabric, and brown, of course – had lived in that pocket for as long as I could remember. I could hear my grandmother’s voice. Brown is a practical colour, Holly. It doesn’t show the dirt. Hurrah for brown. For once, I was glad of my grandmother’s fixed habits. In an instant, I spilled the keys onto the stripped floorboards with a clatter.
The good thing about suitcase keys, my grandmother used to say, was that so many of them worked in multiple locks – you just needed to gauge the size by eye. Perhaps my grandmother had a bit of spy in her, too. The third key I tried fitted perfectly into the lock on Zac’s larger case. There was a satisfying click and the shackle popped out.
I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find inside when I unzipped it, kneeling on the cold floor. Secret documents? Stacks of cash? Jane’s body? My expectations were unreasonably high, so my stomach fell when the lid of the case flopped onto the floor with a puff of dust and I saw that it was empty.
The same key worked on the lock of the medium-sized suitcase, too. ‘Oh,’ I said out loud. Because there was no way that the suitcase nested inside belonged to Zac.
Despite my grandmother-shaped aversion to brown, the hidden case was quite charming. The diagonal lines of four-petalled flowers and interlocking Ls and Vs processed in their determined order, stamped in muted gold on a brown background. One of my hands floated towards the monogrammed canvas and slid extra-lightly across the PVC coating, surprised by how smooth it was. But I quickly got down to the business of unbuckling the leather tag to check whether there was a name on it.
JM was hot-stamped on the surface. It had to stand for Jane Miller. Had to. To my delight, there was a piece of thick cream paper inside the tag, though there was no writing on the front. I took it out and flipped it. On the reverse, in Zac’s perfectly regular cursive, it read Jacinda Molinero. There was no address or telephone number or email. Just the name. Hardly of any use if the suitcase were to be lost.
My language skills had languished since that final MI5 interview. Practising them hurt like an imperfectly healed wound when you picked off the scab. But there was something about the word Molinero … I needed to remember what it meant.
I closed my eyes to try to think. What came to me was the illustrated deck of cards from when I first started to learn Spanish. The teacher thought the cards would help us with the words for different occupations. It was a kind of un-cosy version of Happy Families,where the dentists and plumbers and shopkeepers all looked tired and overworked. There was a particular card I was fumbling for, in whatever dark corner of my brain it was filed in.
I squeezed my eyes shut more tightly, and the picture began to form. An old lady scowling in her blue apron and white hat, letting flour fall from her fingers into a huge yellow sack. Behind her was a red-roofed wooden house with a windmill attached to it. Señora Molinero. That was what it said beneath her. Mrs Miller.
Molinero was Spanish for Miller. Jane Miller. Jacinda Molinero. The first names started with the same letter. Jacinda had to be Jane. Zac’s handwriting on the suitcase label seemed to confirm this.
If you come across any objects of Jane’s, tell us about them in as much detail as you can. That was what Maxine said to me on the bench by the cliffs. But it wasn’t Maxine I wanted this knowledge for. It was me. Me, myself and I, as my grandmother used to say, never clear as to whether she thought this emphasis on self was a good or bad thing. I grabbed my phone and typed in the name Jacinda Molinero, but the search engine returned only blanks.
Thankfully, if Jacinda Molinero’s uber-designer bag ever had a lock, it was missing. The brass zipper moved with satisfying smoothness, and I laid the two halves of the bag carefully on the floor. Each half was covered by a mesh divider, so I unzipped those too. There was nothing beneath them.
One of the dividers had a small zipped pocket built into it, so I undid this and slipped a hand inside. My fingers bumped against something stiff and square, and came up clutching a black card with silver lettering and a foil edge. Albert E. Mathieson, International Tax Law.
I tried another Internet search, this time for Albert E. Mathieson. There were pages of hits, including a link to his business website, multiple articles in professional tax journals, and blog posts that I could see were genuinely informative as well as extremely scary, because they seemed to suggest that it was very easy to be a criminal tax evader and not even know it. He specialised in high-net-worth clients who were in trouble with America’s Internal Revenue Service, and though his office was in Malibu he represented clients in more than fifty countries.
‘Going somewhere, Holly?’
I screamed, and fell backwards, sitting hard on the floorboards, my stomach plunging even faster than the rest of me.
‘Oh my God. I think I had a heart attack.’
‘Lucky I’m here then.’ Zac held out a hand. I reached for it and he pulled me up. He plucked something from my hair. ‘Cobweb.’ He brushed my cheek with a finger, frowned and wet it in his mouth, then tried again. ‘Dust smear.’ He took a miniature bottle of sanitising gel from a pocket and rubbed some on his hands.
‘Don’t ever sneak up on me like that again.’
‘I didn’t sneak, Holly. You were clearly absorbed.’ His voice, as usual, was ironic and light, but his face was pale, his dual-coloured eye extra bright against his skin.
‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’
He shook his head to deny this absurdity. ‘What are you doing?’
I tried to swallow as I thought, but it was difficult. I surprised myself by telling the truth, which was sometimes easier than a lie. ‘I – I wanted to know about you. See your things. See your history, who you were. Are.’
He laughed. ‘Clearly someone whose taste in suitcases has improved.’
‘Why are you here, Zac? You should be on your way to London.’
‘Why are you here, Holly? You should be on your way to the hospital.’ There was a tension in his lips, as if he was trying not to let them move. But there were still occasional twitches.
‘I called in sick. The morning sickness is so bad. I hardly slept last night.’
‘My poor Holly. I had to come back because I forgot my phone. I’ll still make it – my talk isn’t until late this afternoon.’ He smiled slowly. ‘So we’re both here when we should be somewhere else.’
One of my hands rose to his caress his head, which was damp. ‘Is it raining?’
‘No.’
My heart was still beating fast, but he was sweating. I was struck by how controlled he kept everything in the house, as if in contrast to a body he couldn’t perfectly regulate, though he mostly managed to. ‘Are you angry at me?’ I asked.
‘Why would I be?’ He pulled me into his arms.
‘For looking in your suitcases.’ My forehead was against his chest. He smelled soapy and clean and woody and lovely, when the smell of everything else for the past two months had made me want to be sick.
‘Were you telling me the truth about what you’re doing, Holly?’
I pulled away and looked up at him. He was studying me so intently. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, if you wanted to see my history, as you say, you could have asked. So I can’t help but wonder if you were dragging out those suitcases so you could pack them and run away.’
‘No. Of course not.’ I was shaking my head at the irony of my telling the truth but not being believed. ‘How could you think that?’
‘It’s happened before.’ I could feel him playing with my hair again. ‘Dead fly.’
I shuddered. ‘Have you got it?’
‘Yes.’ He walked quickly to the front door to flick it away, then applied more gel to his fingers. ‘This is your house too. You can go anywhere you wish. Touch anything you find. Open whatever cupboard or drawer you want. I’d never stop you.’
‘Really?’
He took a step away, still with a hand on each of my upper arms, as if needing to evaluate me from different vantage points to make his assessment. ‘Really. I have no secrets from you.’ He leaned over to lift something from the floor. The tax attorney’s card, which I must have dropped when Zac walked in. ‘So you found my good friend Al.’
I cleared my throat, feeling caught out again. ‘Yes. Who is he?’
‘American. We were at UCL together – he read international law. Obsessed with tax but an interesting, funny guy. As smart as they come.’ He glanced towards the beautiful suitcase. ‘Was Al’s card in that?’
‘Yes. Did you give the card to Jane?’
‘Could have been Al – he visited us in London once, several years ago. Might have been me – hard to remember. Anything else you want to know before I leave?’
‘Was the suitcase Jane’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘A gift from you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why do you still have it?’
‘I didn’t know I did. She didn’t leave anything behind when she went. Was her suitcase inside one of mine?’
I nodded, then confirmed it with a quiet, ‘That one,’ as I pointed to his medium-sized suitcase.
‘She must have stored it there, so it was a kind of stowaway when I moved here from London – I didn’t know she’d done that. Would you like it?’
‘Wouldn’t that be weird?’
‘Why would it be? It should be used.’
‘Why does the tag say “Jacinda Molinero”? Molinero’s Miller. Right?’
‘It was my nickname for her. Did you look up the Spanish on your phone?’
I nodded. I’d never told him about my ability to speak Spanish, probably because I never wanted him to know about my failed aspiration to be a spy, and my language skills were bound up with that.
‘Jane loved Spanish.’ He looked so fond, even proud, as he talked about her. ‘She seemed to be able to learn any language she wanted, as soon as she stepped into a new country. It’s a rare gift, but some people have it. She loved to travel.’ He had never spoken about her before. So normally. Using her name.
Maxine could fuck off. He wasn’t behaving like a man with anything to hide. Tears were running down my cheeks.
‘What is it? Holly? – You cry so easily these days.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t deserve you.’
‘Yes you do.’
‘I don’t. You should be with someone who’s accomplished – some clever doctor or barrister.’
‘They’re boring. And that would be predictable.’
‘A supermodel.’
This made him laugh. ‘Even more boring. And I’m already with the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You are to me.’
I pulled him closer, trying to shut out Maxine’s voice, which whispered out of my own bones that if I was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen it was only because I bore a likeness to Jane. He looked so pleased when I moved my hands down his back, when I kissed him, when I whispered that I wanted him so much and I couldn’t wait until he returned.
‘But will you always feel that way?’ He moved a hand up my thigh, under my dress, beneath my underwear. ‘Are you sure you’ll never change your mind?’
‘Yes.’ I was unfastening his belt. ‘I’m sure.’
Now The Woman in the Room (#ulink_d6487ddc-8edf-5160-9d12-b8bdc9e5ccbc)
Two years and four months later
Bath, Tuesday, 2 April 2019
At first, I try not to look at the woman who has drawn so many police officers and forensic scientists to this house. I try to look at everything but her. I focus on the room.
The carpet is pale beige. It is clean and soft and probably the last thing she walked on. There is little in the way of furniture. A small pine wardrobe, a television screen attached to the wall, and a four-poster bed of shiny fake wood. The white sheets are so tangled I cannot help but imagine the aftermath of recent sex. It makes me think of another room, and another tempest of a bed, in a faraway house that rests on top of a plague pit by the sea.
‘What do you see?’ The voice is Maxine’s and she is talking to me.
‘The bed doesn’t go.’
‘I mean the woman.’
What I had wanted to say was that the mess of the bed doesn’t go with everything else in the superhumanly clean and empty house. ‘Nobody could die that neatly, in such a messy bed,’ I say.
She is naked, as far as I can tell, though the quilt hides her middle, going from the top of her thighs to the upper edge of her breasts. She is delicate, and probably a few centimetres shorter than I am, though it is difficult to be sure with her lying as she is. Her arms are by her sides, resting above the quilt and curved like parentheses. Her legs are as straight as a ballerina’s, though her toes are not pointed. I wonder if she was arranged in this position before her body grew stiff and cold.
I can’t look at her face. I put my hand to the side of my right eye to stop myself. I am too afraid, and I do not care if Maxine and Tess know it.
‘Were you wanting to say,’ Tess asks, ‘that the messy bed is out of place in context with the rest of the address?’
‘Yes.’
‘Be back in two minutes.’ Tess hurries from the room.
I crouch by the side of the bed. I long to smooth her hair. But again, I am too frightened that if I do I will see her face. If I were alone, I would tell her how sorry I am that I failed her, that I didn’t do enough to help to find her in time.
Where have you been, I silently ask, for the last six years?
My hand curls around hers, an impulse to comfort somebody who is beyond help. Even through the thin blue gloves they made me wear, I can feel that her warmth is gone. She is the temperature of the pine wardrobe. I remember imagining how my baby would pink up, as I fantasised about her birth. What has happened here is the opposite of pinking up. The hand in mine has lost its softness, its human sponginess. There is no give any more. The give, the warmth, the pinking up, that is what makes us human. But this hand is a plastic doll’s.
Maxine crouches beside me. ‘You can’t touch her.’
As I release my grip, I notice the nails. They are well cared for, and though they protrude no more than a few millimetres beyond the tips of her fingers, they are painted pinky-nude. They are not broken – there is no obvious evidence that she fought or struggled.
I want Peggy. I want her to fold me in her arms and let me press myself into her plump softness the way I did as a child.
Tess comes back into the room.
‘Can I ask when this happened?’ I say.
‘The early hours of this morning.’
What I can see of her skin is like a waxwork, but there is a blue tint to the jaundiced-looking yellow.
‘Are those pressure marks on the face?’ Maxine asks. ‘Though they’re not very pronounced.’
The question prompts me to look. It is an accident, a reflex, my movements so quick and panicked that everything is blurred. Before I can tear my eyes away, I glimpse skilfully dyed blonde hair. And I see her face. Her nose and mouth, I think, had oozed blood. The skin around them is extra pale, and her tongue sticks out as if she had bitten it. Her cheeks are dotted with red pinpricks that I think must be some kind of bruising.
‘Could be from post-mortem postural changes,’ Tess says.
What is not pronounced to Tess and Maxine is very pronounced to me.
I have learned too much from Zac. I cannot stop what comes out. ‘It’s suffocation of some kind, isn’t it?’ My voice is quiet. I force my eyes upwards, stop them at her neck, quickly close them before turning my head towards her feet. ‘I can’t see any marks on her neck, so maybe smothering more than strangulation.’
‘And you know this how?’ Tess says.
‘I used to date a cardiologist.’ There is a twinge of fear at saying this, as if Zac were in the room, listening. Even now, I imagine how he would bristle at the word date, and especially at the words used to.
Dating is a word from women’s magazines filled with things that rot your brain. It’s the worst kind of cultural vulgarity.
We will never be in the past tense, Holly. You and I are forever. You don’t go through what we have, invest what we have, only to give up.
This is why I say date. This is why I say used to.
‘Explain what you see, please,’ Tess says.
So I try, in a strange blend of Maxine’s lack of inflection with Zac’s words. What I remember about his saying them to me was his charm, the way he smiled, as if he was telling a dark joke. And that I smiled back, and my face grew flushed, and there were shivers all the way down my arm as he traced a finger over my bare shoulder.
‘It’s the blue tint to her skin. What happens to the heart, and the skin, if someone dies from a cardiac arrest, it’s the same as what happens with suffocation or strangulation. The heart continues to pump blood around the body for at least a couple of beats, but that blood doesn’t have as much oxygen, so it’s less pink. That’s why her skin has the blue tinge – the blood beneath it is deoxygenated.’
Tess nods. ‘Correct. Plus, the eyes are bloodshot.’ I nearly ask how she can know this, but realise she must have prised them open to look before we got here.
Maxine says, ‘Can Helen see her right ankle, please, Tess? You’ll need to go round to the other side of the bed, Helen.’
The oval is there, on the outer side of the lower calf, though I’d already half-glimpsed it. A smoky purple circle the size of a two-pence coin, slightly above the ankle bone. A bruise like a black star sapphire, perfectly cut, and set against the blue-tinted skin.
I am staring at that oval. Maxine is staring at me. ‘I’m not expecting you’d recognise her face in the circumstances, but have you seen the mark before?’ she says.
I can taste bile. The last time I tasted that was when I woke in hospital after it happened.
‘No,’ I say.
‘You’re sure?’ she says. ‘It doesn’t remind you of anything?’
Three years ago, looking at the photo in Zac’s bedside table, I’d wondered if it was a tattoo.
‘It’s a birthmark,’ I say. ‘A dark circle, that’s all.’
‘I’d say it’s very distinctive,’ Maxine says. ‘Would you say that too, Tess?’
‘I would.’
‘Then I will defer to your expertise. Am I free to go?’ My breathing is getting faster. My back is soaked, just as it was during the night sweats after her birth.
‘We’ve come across a photograph,’ Maxine says. ‘On the hard drive of a laptop that someone took a great deal of trouble to copy for us.’
I know who that someone is. That someone is me, and though I’ve never been told exactly what was on the drive, I have guessed.
‘There were indecent images and video footage on that drive – I can assure you it has all been carefully protected.’
I look at my feet. My eyes are welling up but I am determined not to cry.
‘One of the relatively innocuous images is of a woman lounging by a pool. Her birthmark is identical to this one.’
I take a few small steps, unhurriedly, towards the door. ‘I asked if I am free to go.’ I am practically choking.
‘Of course,’ Maxine says.
I am out of the room. I am on the landing. I am halfway down the paper-covered stairs.
Maxine is right behind me. ‘Tell me the specifics of anything you’ve done to give yourself away.’ Her voice is quiet. ‘Contact with anybody from your old life. Any crumb of evidence that could lead Zac to finding you here. Please.’
The image of my grandmother in the newspaper photograph, and the caption with her full name, flashes before me. Maxine’s face is expressionless as I tell her. But I leave out the sound of Peggy’s voice last night, and James’s, both of them flailing in the dark.
There is something else I leave out, too, because it belongs entirely to me, and I genuinely don’t think it is why this has happened. It has been over two years since Milly or I reviewed anything on our blog, but it still exists in hyperspace. A straggle of readers occasionally look at it, and every once in a while, a new comment appears.
Last summer, there was a response to a five-star review of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that I’d written several years earlier. Somebody with the username Abandoned Friend had this to say.
Your review sucks. You don’t address how selfish the heroine is. Whatever her husband did to her, she doesn’t stop to think about the worry and grief she caused the people she left behind. What about her poor aunt, who loved her? She should have found a way to let her know she was okay.
I didn’t know for sure that Abandoned Friend was Milly. But it seemed pretty likely that she was, and that she was talking about Peggy when she mentioned the poor aunt. So I created a new User Name, Brontë Fan, and replied to the comment.
I don’t think you are being fair. If she’d let her aunt know, that would have increased the risk of being discovered, and might also have put her aunt in danger. She knew her aunt was wise and would understand, and hoped the day would come when they could be reunited.
As soon as I posted the message, I felt sick, knowing I shouldn’t have done it.
I haven’t revisited the blog since then, fearing that even the act of opening the page would set off an alert somewhere.
‘Holly.’ The way Maxine says my name, my real name, out of anyone’s hearing, is almost human. For nearly two years, my grandmother has been the only one to call me that.
Despite this, my next words come like an explosion. ‘Why don’t they just arrest him? You know he’s done this.’
‘They need evidence first – that’s what’s happening here right now.’
‘Why didn’t they arrest him two years ago, once you had the hard drive? She wouldn’t be dead if you had.’
‘The data wasn’t as strong as we’d hoped, back then – it wasn’t conclusive. As far as the body in that room—’
‘Not “the body”. Jane. A human being called Jane.’
‘As far as Jane is concerned, we can’t go around making arrests for cases that the Crown Prosecution Service would toss in the bin. We need to get this right, so it will stick.’
I press my fists against my eyes. ‘He’s here. A woman came to the hospital. I think she must be his wife. With a little girl who must be his. Is she? Is she his daughter?’
‘Yes. His wife and his child. You’ve nothing to fear from them.’
‘The child is the same age …’ My voice trails off.
‘I know that must be difficult for you.’
‘Does the woman know who I am?’
‘We think probably not. The little girl’s medical condition is real. She needed that clinic appointment.’
‘Are they safe? He shouldn’t be allowed near a child.’
‘There’s no evidence he would hurt a child.’ She is uncharacteristically thoughtful, even hesitant, before she continues. ‘I’d hoped you could put all of this behind you. I wish that could have been true.’
Then A Quarrel (#ulink_05745728-30c4-57d3-9043-077701cd79ee)
Two years and three months earlier
Cornwall, 3 January 2017
Since finding Jane’s suitcase two weeks ago, I’d barely thought of anything else. On the third day of January, though, I was thinking about Milly instead. I was on my way to see her, and we were meeting by the harbour.
The sea was boiling. The wind was howling. The waves were moving walls of rock. Milly and I would never take the safer, drier lanes through the town. Like teenagers, we stuck to the path that followed the sea wall. Spray shot out and up, chasing us. We knew we really could be snatched and swallowed. It had happened to others before.
We threw our arms around each other, grabbed hands and ran through a gauntlet of water, screaming and laughing our calls of Happy New Year, refusing to worry about slipping, stopping to buy chips at one of the cafes along the harbour. There was a belated rendition of Happy Birthday, sung by Milly to me.
We turned on to the eighteenth-century pier, passing walls of stacked lobster pots, jumbo bags of green rope, and red plastic crates for hauling the dead mackerel from the boats to the land. The smell made me gag, but Milly didn’t notice and we walked on to the pier’s far end, where the air was clear.
Our feet were soaked, our hair was drenched, and we were shivering. But we were happy, sitting on the stone bench that followed the wall of the pier and doubled as our backrest. We were burning our fingers on the chips.
I scrambled to my feet, standing on the bench to look over the wall, so I could watch the lighthouse winking in the distance. Milly did the same.
‘I’ve missed you,’ she said.
I pictured the two of us, dancing together in a nightclub upcountry to celebrate my sixteenth birthday, our arms around each other, tinsel in our hair and swaying in heels too high to walk in, the room and lights spinning from too many bottles of beer, elated that we had pulled it off despite being underage.
‘Me too you,’ I said.
‘My mother says you have a father complex, because of your dad dying and all. She says that’s what you see in Zac.’
‘Eew. That’s not true.’ Though a part of me knew it was. Still, I blushed at the idea of Peggy thinking that.
‘We’re neglecting the blog,’ Milly said. ‘We’ll lose followers.’
‘I’ll do something this week. Wuthering Heights has been getting a lot of hate.’
‘Mum will be happy. She’s our number one fan. But have I told you lately she is completely insane? We crossed on the stairs, and she closed her eyes and chanted “Avert” and waved her hands about. Honestly, it was the most embarrassing thing.’
‘Did she pick that up when we made her read The Earthsea Quartet?’
‘Yep, but she won’t admit she’s trying to ward off curses or bad luck. She’d die before she confessed to any superstition about stair crossing.’
‘Have I told you lately that I am an orphan, and you are lucky to have a mum?’
‘Well you have Lord Voldemort. I can’t believe he let you out. Does he make you sleep in a dungeon?’
‘Yes – but don’t call him that, Milly.’
‘I’ll see your Lord Voldemort and raise you a Gaston.’
‘Fair enough. I deserved that.’
‘Looks like Lord Voldemort. Acts like Lord Voldemort. He’s even got the bald thing going on. Please tell me he hasn’t branded you with the dark mark.’
‘Only between my legs.’
She snorted a mouthful of the beer she’d brought out from the pub, the last place in the row of shops and restaurants along the front, and the closest one to the pier. I was drinking spiced tomato juice, and Milly thought this was because I was driving, which was true but not the most important reason.
‘You’re still in there after all,’ she said. ‘I was beginning to think he’d replaced you with a Stepford wife. Thank God the two of you aren’t married.’
‘He wants to.’
‘Well don’t. Please, promise me you won’t.’
My own secret voice was saying, You’re betraying him to sit and listen to this. You should say, How dare you talk about him that way. You should go home right now.
‘You’ll never escape him if you do,’ she said.
‘I don’t want to escape him.’ I thought of my baby, and how desperately I wanted him – or her – to be raised by two parents. To have what I didn’t.
‘Has he taken control of your bank accounts yet?’
‘No! I wouldn’t let him. But he wouldn’t try.’ As if to protect my baby from what we were saying, my hand started to float towards my tummy, though there wasn’t much of a bump yet. I had wanted to tell Milly about the baby several weeks ago, but Zac persuaded me that nobody should share such news until after the magic three-month mark, when the chance of miscarriage was dramatically reduced. The start of January meant I had reached that mark.
Milly looked genuinely surprised. ‘No joint accounts?’
‘No.’
‘Strange. That’s not what I’d have predicted. He’s not tried to get his name on the deed to your house?’
I was lucky, in that I had the house my parents left me, plus some money from my father’s pension. But I was still careful to live off my salary.
‘Of course not. He’s generous – too generous – but he likes to keep his things and mine legally separate. It’s a big thing with him, and it’s important to me too, because of my grandmother.’
My grandmother had savings from the sale of the family farm many years ago, and I was using them to fund her care. But the money was being eaten away fast, and it wouldn’t be long before I had to take over the cost.
Milly shook her head. Her blonde hair gleamed in the moonlight, then dimmed as a heavy cloud moved in front of the full fat moon again to eclipse it. ‘Okay. I have to admit that that stumps me.’
‘Why do you hate him so much, Milly?’
‘He hates me.’
‘He doesn’t.’ We were back in total darkness, feeling the mist from the sea but unable to see it. ‘He wants to get to know you.’
‘No he doesn’t. Question. Did you tell him we were meeting tonight?’
‘He’s on nights tonight.’
‘I know that, Holly – I saw him going in as I was coming out. That’s not an answer. You could have told him yesterday or this morning. Does he know?’
‘No.’
‘I knew it. That’s why we’re here. If you’d told him, he’d have got in the way. You know it too. You’re just not admitting it to yourself. He’s found ten different ways to stop us spending time together over the last few weeks.’
We turned away from the wall, facing the harbour once more. ‘It was the time of year, Milly.’ I sat down again. ‘You said so yourself.’
‘I was trying to make it easy for you.’ She sat too. ‘Do you ever make calls without his being there?’
‘All the time.’ But I realised this wasn’t true. Somehow Zac was invariably nearby when I used my phone.
Milly went on. ‘He may not be controlling your money yet, but you will get sick of him, and when you try to leave he won’t make it easy. Mum and I are frightened. He’s cutting you off from us.’
I tried to lighten things. ‘Isn’t this a bit dramatic? I want to make a family with him. I want to make what you grew up in.’
‘And he fucking well knows it. He’s playing you. He’s saying what you want to hear.’
‘He’s loving. He cares for me.’ I threw up my hands, invisible in the darkness. ‘I matter to him.’
‘Of course you do. More than anything in the world. I’ve heard him say it and that’s what scares me. He chose you because he thinks you have no one. He thinks you’re all alone. But he’s wrong. You have us.’
Although I never felt the cold since becoming pregnant, I shivered. ‘I know that.’
‘Well don’t ever forget it.’ The light slowly returned as the cloud moved sideways to reveal the moon. Milly pulled away to study me. ‘At least you’re starting to look more like you again. Your face isn’t so thin and pale. And I love what you’re wearing.’
‘Chosen for you.’ I loved what I was wearing too. Green ankle boots, bobbled red wool tights, a short mustard tube skirt, and a fleecy orange jumper to disguise my thickening waist. I unzipped my coat and flashed the full view at Milly.
‘And Rainbow Girl is back!’ she said. ‘Goodbye, Grey Woman. Hello there, Rainbow Girl. We’ve missed you. I much prefer you in clothes I need to wear sunglasses to look at.’
‘Hello.’ I zipped up again.
‘Oh, don’t put it away. I want a pic to show Mum.’ Milly’s teeth were chattering.
‘You won’t get a pic out here. Not with the light changing every five seconds.’ The moon was flashing at us, off, on, off, on, as a procession of clouds sped past to eclipse and uncover her. She seemed to mirror the lighthouse’s lamp. For an instant, I glimpsed a frown that Milly didn’t imagine I could see. ‘How’s Gaston?’ I said.
‘I hate him so much,’ Milly said, ‘that I want him to die, because then I would get over him. But I can’t stop fucking him.’
It was my turn to snort my drink.
Milly went on. ‘I hate how he puts that fucking gross hairspray on that fucking gross long hair of his, and I wish it would catch fire when he fills that fucking gross old wreck of a car of his with petrol.’ She paused. ‘Look how – odd – you look.’
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Claire Kendal
Copyright (#uf4e780a2-8b4c-5fb4-85dc-5c4a015474b1)
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Copyright © Claire Kendal 2019
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019 Cover photograph © John Cooper/Arcangel Images (https://www.arcangel.com/creative-stock-photography)
Claire Kendal asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008256838
Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008256852
Version: 2019-05-23
Dedication (#uf4e780a2-8b4c-5fb4-85dc-5c4a015474b1)
For my brother Robert
Contents
Cover (#u4adba48e-8baa-57d5-94bc-c4b42b1ba37e)
Title Page (#ub36e3e95-7cb3-5604-993b-115d17249c24)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue An Interview
Now A Discovery
Then Black Star Sapphire
Now The Girl with the Two-Coloured Eye
Then Human Asset
Now The Two Tunnels
Then The Plague Pit
Now The Backwards House
Then The Forgotten Things
Now The Woman in the Room
Then A Quarrel
Now The Excursion
Then Provocations
Now Further Warnings
Then Eavesdropping
Now Persistence
Then Concealment
Now The Robin
Then Startling Intelligence
Now The Visit
Then A Meeting
Now An Assault
Then April Fool
Now An Ambush
Then The Handkerchief Tree
Now The Doors With No Knobs
Then A Misadventure
Now A Misdemeanour
Then The Studio
Now Further Intelligence
Then The Spin Out
Now Illegal Entry
Then The Memory Box
Now The Choice
Then The Drowning Place
Now Thorpe Hall
Now The Miniature
Now The Present
Keep Reading …
Acknowledgements
For those affected by the issues in this novel
About the Author
Also by Claire Kendal
About the Publisher
Epigraph (#uf4e780a2-8b4c-5fb4-85dc-5c4a015474b1)
‘You have almost completed your painting,’ said I, approaching to observe it more closely, and surveying it with a greater degree of admiration and delight than I cared to express. ‘A few more touches in the foreground will finish it I should think.—But why have you called it Fernley Manor, Cumberland, instead of Wildfell Hall, —shire?’ I asked, alluding to the name she had traced in small characters at the bottom of the canvass.
But immediately I was sensible of having committed an act of impertinence in so doing; for she coloured and hesitated; but after a moment’s pause, with a kind of desperate frankness, she replied,—
‘Because I have friends—acquaintances at least—in the world, from whom I desire my present abode to be concealed; and as they might see the picture, and might possibly recognize the style in spite of the false initials I have put in the corner, I take the precaution to give a false name to the place also, in order to put them on a wrong scent, if they should attempt to trace me out by it.’
Anne Brontë,
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,
Chapter V, ‘The Studio’
Prologue An Interview (#uf4e780a2-8b4c-5fb4-85dc-5c4a015474b1)
London, April 2013
The clear glass table meant that I had to work extra hard to stop my knee from jerking up and down. It was not a time to show nervousness. Maxine was on one side of the table. I was on the other.
‘You are twenty-one, Holly. Correct?’ She started simply, but her use of my first name was a warning. She had only ever called me by my surname.
‘Correct.’
‘Do you have many friends?’
‘A few good ones.’
She nodded. I had never seen her nod before. Nodding is a gesture that suggests interest, and that wasn’t something she normally allowed herself to show.
‘It’s good to be selective.’ She smiled. I hadn’t seen her do that before either.
‘I’m glad you think so.’
‘And your grandmother raised you?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s sad about your parents. What a thing to happen.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘You were two?’
She’d got it wrong on purpose. I was certain of it. ‘Three.’ Was I right to correct her? Should I have let it go? What was the best response? I needed to quit second-guessing what she wanted to hear and just say what was true.
‘It was a car crash?’ Maxine didn’t have any notes. She didn’t need any notes. She was in command of my ‘facts’ without having to write them down.
‘Yes.’ It was crucial to keep it brief.
‘I apologise for the personal nature of some of the questions I have to ask you.’ Had she really used the word ‘apologise’? Maxine?
The lights in the room were unnaturally bright. The wall behind me was extremely white. But the wall behind Maxine, which I was facing, was a mirror of glass. It was a safe bet that it was one-way glass, and my performance was being assessed from the other side of it, in a darkened room. I imagined Maxine’s boss, Martin, behind the glass, enjoying the peep show but appearing bored.
‘You’ve known the Hargrave family for how long?’
‘Since I was four. Most of my life.’ I felt my lips trembling. My body was not under my control. I was losing it. Why did this woman scare me so much?
‘Tell me about them.’ Maxine settled in her chair, ready to be entertained.
‘Peggy is the mother, James is the father. They have a daughter.’
There was that smile again. The indulgent kind you give to a difficult child. ‘And the daughter has a name, I presume?’
‘Sorry. Yes. Milly.’ Maxine knew this already, despite the pretence. I’d given permission for them to interview friends and family. I’d had to, though there weren’t many. Peggy, James, and Milly. My list of three, because my grandmother hardly knew what day of the week she was living any more.
‘You and Milly are very close, aren’t you? Best friends, as they say.’
‘I’d never tell her’ – I flapped around for the right phrase – ‘anything I shouldn’t.’
‘Of course you wouldn’t. Milly’s family moved next door when you were four?’
‘Yes.’ Elaboration was not my friend.
I reminded myself that these were the easy questions. The seemingly innocuous warm-up questions to lull me into the false sense of security that would get me to mess up and reveal every vulnerability I’d ever had. My stomach knotted, and I tried not to let myself panic about what might be coming.
‘And you moved in when?’
‘I was born in that house. My grandmother moved in to look after me when my parents died. Milly’s family bought the house next door just before the two of us started school – she and I are the same age.’
‘Your grandmother was quite old when she became your guardian, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes.’
Maxine smiled again, and I shivered so hard it must have been visible on the other side of the one-way glass. ‘That can’t have been much fun for a small child.’
I tried to think of what to say to this, but I took too long, so Maxine went on. ‘You are close to Milly’s mother? Peggy, you said?’
‘Yes.’
‘Peggy must have seen you as a poor little neglected orphan.’ Maxine was a combination of effortful glamour and mess. Her hair was bottle-blonde but lank. Pieces of different lengths hung in front of her face, as if she’d hacked at them herself.
‘I think she probably did, yes.’
‘Tell me more, Holly.’ That jagged curtain of hair was one of Maxine’s tactics for hiding, though I managed a glimpse of hooded eyes that were grey that day but could easily be changed with contact lenses.
‘I think Peggy wanted – she still wants – to protect me. To mother me, even.’ I was saying too much when I needed to be spare in my answers. Part of what Maxine was testing was that I could be reserved, even under pressure.
‘And Peggy’s husband is around – James Hargrave. What is he like?’ Maxine pushed her hair behind her ears. Not a Maxine gesture. Her mascara and eyeliner were heavy. She had gone for her usual indigo. No ordinary black for her. The foundation was caked on. Maxine was a woman of many faces.
‘He runs the town pharmacy.’
‘And?’
‘James is very kind, but he doesn’t say much.’
I didn’t explain that it was as if Peggy had such a lot to say there was nothing left for James – and they both seemed to like it that way.
‘Very kind? That’s mild. You aren’t damning by faint praise?’
‘There is a lot to be said for real kindness.’ As soon as the words were out, I wanted to take them back – she was going to think I was judging her, that I was rebuking her.
‘I agree,’ she said, but this didn’t make me relax. ‘And your grandmother is fond of the Hargrave family? As fond as you clearly are?’
‘My grandmother hates pretty much everybody.’
Maxine laughed, something I hadn’t seen her do even once during the residential phase of the recruitment process, which she was leading. Along with the other aspiring intelligence officers, I watched Maxine as if she were a superstar.
‘But she worships James,’ I said.
‘You are admirably loyal, Holly, aren’t you? Am I correct in thinking that you gave up your place at Exeter University to look after your grandmother? You were going to read Modern Languages?’
‘I couldn’t leave my grandmother alone. I’d been trying to delay putting her in a nursing home, so I enrolled on a BA in English at Falmouth instead of the Exeter course – I can commute to Falmouth pretty easily from our house. I’m due to graduate this summer.’
‘You’re predicted a first.’
‘Yes. And I took every evening course they offered in French, Spanish, and German, to try to compensate for not being able to do Modern Languages. I’m fluent in all three – I studied them in school too.’
‘You got As for all three at A level, and an A in English Literature. Correct?’
‘Yes. And I can get by in Italian. I’ve been working towards a career in the Security Service for as long as I can remember.’
I had been obsessed with spies since I was a very little girl. My grandmother told me that my father used to play ‘I Spy’ with me, using the game to show me the world. I liked to imagine him in his blue-grey RAF uniform, pointing into the night, where he would soon be flying.
I Spy with my little eye, something far up in the sky …
… Moon.
When I was five, I tiptoed into the sitting room and hid behind my grandmother’s brown-velvet wingback chair to peek at a film she was watching. I sat, cross-legged, on her scratchy brown carpet, so perfectly still and quiet she never knew I was there. To this day I don’t know what the film was called. Only that it was about a spy who pretended to his family he was a boring businessman. Then, a bad spy injected him with truth serum, and this made him confess to his wife about his double life as an intelligence officer.
With the reasoning of a five-year-old, I decided to make my own truth serum and administer it to my grandmother, using the best available laboratory facilities. While she was cooking dinner, I sneaked into her bedroom and scooped out tiny spoonfuls of the lotions and scents on her dressing table, then stirred them into the moisturising cream she rubbed onto her face each night. My fantasy was that the serum would force my grandmother into revealing the secrets I was certain she was keeping about my parents.
When I was ready to begin the interrogation, I noticed that she had a bright-red and extremely bumpy rash on her cheeks. She never imagined the cause, and I crept back into her room to steal the cream away and dispose of it at the bottom of the kitchen rubbish so she would never use it again. I was frightened that I’d mortally injured her, but she seemed to recover quickly.
On my eighth birthday, Harriet the Spy appeared in my Christmas stocking, and Harriet became my absolute hero. She carried her spy notebook everywhere, so I did too, writing little observations about everything I saw. I made things up as well. It was only later that I learned that spies were supposed to keep to what was true, and were trained to be cautious about what they put on paper – two principles I wasn’t very good at heeding.
‘I can see that you have been commendably strategic and goal-driven in wanting to join us.’ Maxine gave me another of those intimate nods. ‘But in this line of work, how far would you push it? You’re very attractive.’ Despite the appeasing gestures, Maxine shifted the subject with the suddenness of a window exploding in a storm. ‘You know that.’
I blinked at this new Maxine. She was being kind but firm, friendly but still clearly the one with the power.
She pushed at me again. ‘Where does the line come, Holly?’
I realised I was biting the side of my lower lip, a sign of the anxiety I wanted to hide. ‘Emotional. Emotional involvement. That’s the line I wouldn’t cross.’
Maxine was in full-friend mode, pretending that the two of us were just ordinary women exchanging confidences. ‘So as long as it isn’t emotional …’ her voice was gentle, understanding ‘… physical involvement is okay – to – a – point.’ She tapped the table’s bevelled edge with her index finger, picking it up and setting it down again a few centimetres further along with her last three words, as if counting.
‘Are you asking – if I would sleep with someone for the role?’ I imagined Martin on the other side of the one-way glass, controlling any impulse to sit up straighter or open his mouth wide. He wouldn’t react at all.
‘Now that you mention it.’
I thought I was saying the right thing, but I pictured Martin, no longer able to disguise his interest, sticking his feet out and crossing them at the ankles, leaning back in his chair and shaking his head. Because he could see that I was a fish being reeled in. ‘No, No I wouldn’t.’
‘Are you sure?’ Maxine said this as if she were trying to help me, trying to tell me I had given the wrong answer and should flip it.
‘That would be like prostituting myself for the country. So no.’ My shoe was tapping wildly against the white-tiled floor. I froze, and the absence of noise from it was too noticeable.
‘Even if it was the only way to save your life and the lives of hundreds of others?’
I was flailing, trying to guess what she wanted to hear rather than saying what I thought. Which was the worst thing I could do. ‘If it was for the role. I would be happy to – to go as far as I needed to for the role.’
Maxine’s usual un-reactiveness was gone. She tilted her head, a questioning gesture of moral disgust, as if in disbelief that she’d heard me right. ‘What if you had a boyfriend?’
‘I would go – ahead – and tell him afterwards.’ I was bobbing my head up and down, trying to signal that I meant what I said, that I was trustworthy.
Maxine’s girlfriend pretence had vanished. ‘So you’d cheat to get information.’
I had wanted the job with MI5 more than I ever wanted anything, and I had got so far and so close after multiple tests of my situational judgement and core skills. But it was rushing away from me faster than water down a drain.
Maxine shook her head. She said the most important thing she ever said to me. The thing I would replay all the time.
‘You know, a physical relationship is not acceptable. You are making yourself vulnerable. It’s all about using this.’ She almost smiled. She placed a hand on each side of her head without actually touching it. ‘Rather than that’ – she lowered her hands from her breasts to her hips, again without touching herself – ‘to get what you need.’
There was nothing left for me to do. I knew the implications of what I had said, and that there was no recovering from it.
‘I think,’ said Maxine, ‘that this brings your interview to an end.’
When I was very little, my grandmother often chose my bedtime stories from Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children. Her favourite had a huge mouthful of a title. ‘MATILDA Who told Lies, and was Burned to Death.’ This was probably because my grandmother hated my mother, and my mother’s name was Matilda. It didn’t occur to my grandmother that having a heroine who was my mother’s namesake would only make me love her more.
Plus, my grandmother could never convince me that Matilda was really dead. ‘It was a trick,’ I would say. ‘Matilda hid in a fireproof cellar but the story forgot to tell us.’ I didn’t confess to my grandmother that I often dreamed my parents were still alive, and it had all been a mistake. I never believed in the words ‘The End’ when my grandmother finished and snapped the book closed. I was convinced the characters continued on somewhere, and I would try to imagine the next phase of their lives for myself.
All in all, the effect of my grandmother’s cautionary tales was not what she intended. They just gave me ideas about the interesting things I could do, and alerted me to potential disasters so I could try to figure out how to avoid them, though I didn’t always succeed.
My grandmother was forever muttering about listeners at keyholes being vexed, and eavesdroppers never hearing good of themselves. ‘That is what you must reflect upon, Holly,’ she would say.
The best response to this, like most of the things my grandmother said, was the word, ‘Yes’, usually accompanied by a solemn nod. But in truth, the only thing I reflected upon was how to avoid detection.
Soon after they moved into the house next door, Peggy discovered me lying like a tiger along a high branch of my grandmother’s apple tree. It was the end of summer, and I was watching Peggy play with Milly on the other side of the fence that ran between our houses, while James manned the barbeque.
Peggy thought that this incident was an aberration. She saw me as a sweet little girl whose loneliness and longing for family had put her in danger, though it was Peggy’s own startled screech at seeing me in the tree that almost made me fall out of it. But my spying was no aberration. I simply made sure Peggy never caught me at it again.
Peggy was in the habit of leaving the laundry room window open so she could dangle out the hose that vented the hot air from her tumble dryer. The laundry room was Peggy’s favourite place for private conversations. I could peek from my father’s dusty first-floor study and see right into that laundry room.
I loved my father’s study, where I often hunted for clues about my parents, though I only ever found one thing. A photograph of them on their wedding day, hidden in his copy of A Tale of Two Cities. I liked to sit and read in my father’s old armchair, which was covered in green leather. I’d dragged it near the window. From there, I could monitor what was happening at Peggy’s. If her washing machine and tumble dryer were off, then listening in was no challenge. In fact, I regarded such a circumstance as an invitation.
And that is how I came to hear Peggy and Milly talking together when I was back home in St Ives, two months after my disastrous final MI5 interview. As soon as I saw that the laundry room light was on and Peggy and Milly had gone in, I ran downstairs, slipped into the garden, squeezed through the rip in the fence Milly and I always used as a not-very-secret passage, and flattened myself against a tangle of Peggy’s honeysuckle.
‘She’s so deflated,’ Peggy was saying, ‘since she’s come home. I think she’s embarrassed about the reason – she can’t bear to look your father in the eye.’
I’d had to say something about why MI5 didn’t give me the job, because Peggy and James and Milly knew I’d got to the final stage of the recruitment process. There was no disguising the outcome.
‘She was brave to tell us, Mum,’ Milly said. ‘And fucking stupid.’
‘You don’t need to use that language, Milly.’
But Milly was right. I had been stupid to reveal the truth about the way I’d messed up. What had possessed me to give them the details? Perhaps I did it because it was the most un-spy-like action I could take, a kind of embracing of my failure. It was an act of self-sabotage I decided never to repeat.
‘Sorry.’ Milly didn’t sound at all sorry. ‘People say all sorts of shit.’
‘Honestly, Milly,’ Peggy said.
‘She wanted us to see her real self,’ said Milly. ‘To see her at her worst and still love her. She knows she’s not going to save the world by fucking someone.’
I imagined Peggy rolling her eyes in weariness at Milly’s continued swearing. ‘She’d never have actually done it,’ Peggy said. ‘Those recruiters were fools to believe she would.’
The scent of honeysuckle was choking me, mixed with the nearby roses I had been trying not to stab myself with. Somehow, though, a thorn caught my finger and my eyes welled up as I sucked away the blood and hoped that Peggy was right.
Now A Discovery (#uf4e780a2-8b4c-5fb4-85dc-5c4a015474b1)
Five and a half years later
Bath, Tuesday, 25 December 2018
I know the day is going to be bad as soon as I see the kingfisher. He is so perfect, captured beneath the surface of the ice. He stops me in my run as if I have slammed into an invisible wall. Just like him.
I peer over the railings of the small bridge at the frozen water below, for a closer look. He must have been fishing, when the water thickened and trapped him. The vivid blue of his tail, and the dots on the top of his head, are clear beneath the thin layer above him. He is beautifully preserved in his ice cube. There is no sign he fought it, with those wings cupping his body so peacefully, his beak closed and pointed straight ahead.
I cannot bear to look any more, and if I don’t get going I will be late for my visit to my grandmother at the nursing home. So I tear my eyes away and resume my run, trying to tell myself it isn’t a bad omen, but knowing deep down that it must be.
My grandmother has refused to get out of bed today, so Katarina takes me upstairs to her room. The door is open a crack, but not wide enough for me to see in. The sharp scent of lemon disinfectant makes the inside of my nose prickle.
‘Who’s that!’ my grandmother says.
I push the door wide open. ‘It’s me, Grandma.’
‘Who are you? I don’t know you.’ My grandmother rattles the safety rails of her bed like an angry child. ‘You’re not Princess Anne.’
‘No. Sorry. It’s just me. Just Holly.’ It isn’t possible for my grandmother to call me anything else. I moved her from the nursing home in St Ives to this one in Bath twenty months ago, and I told Katarina and the others who look after her here that Holly has always been my grandmother’s nickname for me, but that my actual name is Helen.
‘Go away. Go get Princess Anne.’
‘After I’ve spent a little time with you.’ I bend to kiss my grandmother’s cheek. She is wearing the lilac nightdress and matching bed jacket that I asked Katarina to put under the tree for her. Katarina has arranged the pillows so that my grandmother is sitting up.
I move a slippery vinyl chair closer to the bed. I lift one of her hands. The skin is loose, and so thin it tears when she bruises. The surface is a jungle of liver spots and protruding green veins. Her fingers are bent as the gnarled branches of a weathered tree. ‘Happy Christmas, Grandma.’
‘Is it Christmas?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that why you’re wearing that ridiculous red hat?’
‘Yes. Katarina gave it to me. There’s going to be a lovely party downstairs. Will you let me help you dress? We can go together.’
‘I had a feeling something was happening today.’ She grimaces.
‘It’s also my birthday, Grandma.’
‘How old are you then?’
‘Twenty-seven.’
‘Have you seen my Christmas present?’
‘You’re wearing it. It’s a pretty colour on you.’
She examines her sleeve as if it were covered in bird poo. ‘Not this.’ She stresses this to make her disgust clear. ‘My new photograph.’
The frame sits on her bedside table, beside a plastic jug of water with a matching tumbler in an unfortunate shade of urine-yellow. Almost immediately, my grandmother blocks it from my view, lurching her upper body to the side to try to grab at the photograph with her arthritic fingers. There is a crash, and a cry. ‘Blast! Oh, oh oh!’ She is screaming in frustration.
‘It’s okay. It’s okay.’ I am out of my chair and rushing to the other side of the bed. Water has sloshed everywhere. The jug has bounced onto the linoleum floor.
‘Don’t be upset.’ I am already in her efficient wet room with its accessible shower and toilet and sink, grabbing a vinegar-smelling towel. I retrieve the frame from beneath the bed where it landed, and wrap it in the towel.
‘Is Princess Anne all right?’ my grandmother says.
I can feel my face creasing in puzzlement as I sweep the towel over the floor with a foot. I study the image inside the frame. ‘Oh my God.’
‘Don’t talk that way. You’re a heathen – you cannot be my granddaughter.’
‘But it really is Princess Anne.’
‘Of course it is. Kindly answer my question, please.’ My grandmother makes the words kindly and please sound like insults. ‘I asked if Princess Anne is all right.’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t hear you.’
Her ears are still as sharp as the wolf’s, but I repeat the word. ‘Yes.’
‘No cracks?’
‘Not even a hairline fracture.’ I cannot tear my eyes from the picture, which has been cut from an article that appeared in a local newspaper last September. Three whole months ago. All that time, I was living my poor imitation of a normal life, not knowing this was out there.
Princess Anne’s skirt and jacket are sewn from maroon and navy tartan. My grandmother is wearing her favourite dress. A background of dried earth, sprinkled with flowers the shade of wet mud. This is an adventurous pattern and pallet for my grandmother. Her white wisps of hair look lit from within.
My grandmother is standing, a wooden walking stick shaped like a candy cane in each hand, and care workers on both sides, ready to catch her if she crumbles. I think of my grandmother as tall, but she is stooped and tiny in front of Princess Anne, and looking up at her with a slant eye. My grandmother is not trying to please. My grandmother is never trying to please. Princess Anne bends towards her. The princess’s back is straight and perfect and in line with her neck and head. Only the hinge of her waist moves. The impression is that she is paying homage to my grandmother, rather than the reverse, as you would expect. This is exactly how my grandmother thinks things should be.
My grandmother says, ‘Will Princess Anne be coming to see me again soon, Holly?’ Despite my shock, and my fear, a small part of me registers that at least my grandmother has remembered my name. ‘As soon as she gets a chance, Grandma.’
I am not much of a royal follower. But staring at the photograph, I recall Princess Anne’s visit, and the excitement it occasioned in the residents and staff at the care home. I was working that day, and happy to miss it.
Katarina hurries in, wearing a red Santa hat with a white pom-pom that matches the one she put on my head when I arrived. She has on a tinsel bracelet and necklace, too. ‘Everything okay?’
‘Just a water spill. All dry now.’ I hold out the photograph. ‘How thoughtful,’ I say to Katarina. ‘Is this from you?’
She nods. ‘I think Mrs Lawrence likes it.’
‘She does. That was so kind of you.’ I am trying to seem pleased when I am anything but. But the damage is done. However I seem, it will make no difference now.
There is a tagline beneath the photograph. The Princess Royal talks to Oaks resident Beatrice Lawrence, 93.
It is the sight of my grandmother’s name in print that makes my breath catch in a blend of fear and nausea. All the things I have done. All the measures I have taken. Except for this photograph. This is what I missed. What I didn’t foresee. A tiny thing that might make all the difference. The chance is small, but I know better than anybody that I must prepare for the possibility that this will lead him straight to me.
Then Black Star Sapphire (#uf4e780a2-8b4c-5fb4-85dc-5c4a015474b1)
Two years and eight months earlier
Cornwall, April 2016
The three years since I failed to join MI5 passed slowly, with little to show for them. I spent the time taking care of my grandmother, moving her into a nursing home, and working behind the counter of the town pharmacy that Milly’s father owned.
Everything changed when Milly helped me to get a new job as a ward clerk in the hospital where she worked as a nurse. On my first day, when there was a telephone call for Dr Zachary Hunter, I knew exactly where to find him. The click-clack of his shoes let me track him like the crocodile in Peter Pan.
I hovered in the doorway of a side room, watching Dr Hunter examine a patient whose eyes were closed. The woman’s arm fell from the bed and dangled as he manoeuvred her.
‘Dr Hunter?’ Those were the first words I ever said to him. ‘GP on the phone.’
I felt professional. I felt as if I were starring in a television drama set in a hospital. I felt proud that I was being so helpful. I was extra-diligent. I paid attention to absolutely everything and everyone. Already, I was on top of it all.
Dr Hunter’s back was towards me. Otherwise, I might have seen that he was rolling his eyes in irritation. If he hadn’t been pulling the red triangle above the patient’s bed, so that the siren went off and the lights flashed, I might have heard him swearing under his breath at the idiot new girl.
What I saw, though, when he turned his head, was a calm face, filled with energy and intelligence. What I heard, as he gave me clear, succinct instructions, was an authoritative voice. ‘Dial 2222. Say, “Adult cardiac arrest on the cardiac unit”. Go. Now, Holly. And call me Zac.’
What I thought, as he began chest compressions, was how does he know my name? What I noticed, unable to look away, was that the compressions were a kind of violence. The patient’s white belly flopped from side to side each time he plunged down on her.
‘Go,’ he said again. And, at last, I did.
Afterwards, I said, ‘Sorry about earlier. I’m still learning how it all works.’
He looked at me carefully. ‘It can be overwhelming when you’re new. You’ll learn quickly. And thank you for passing on the message from the GP.’
It was only then that I properly registered that he was entirely bald, though from his face I’d guessed he wasn’t more than forty. I blushed, not simply out of embarrassment for my blundering, but because he had already won me over with his life-saving heroics, his composure under pressure, and his courtesy, which I did not think I deserved.
Although I didn’t get to learn the secrets that working for MI5 would have revealed, I soon understood that the hospital had its secrets too, even if they weren’t of national importance.
There was a young woman, a few years younger than me, waiting for a heart transplant. Over coffee, Zac spoke to me about the case in a hushed voice. ‘I shouldn’t tell you, but I trust you.’ Even as my eyes filled with tears to hear that the young woman would almost certainly die, I was imagining how I would write about her in my journal. Zac touched my hand. ‘Don’t be sad,’ he said. There was a tender side to him, despite the swaggering.
When Zac walked through the ward, the eyes of the patients and their families followed him like a flower follows the sun. Zac was a god there, and he knew it. He didn’t bother to hide the fact that he revelled in his power. Zac saw everything. When he saw that my eyes followed him too, he strutted even more.
My grandmother had told me again and again that my long-dead father was a hero, and I did not doubt it. He was a pilot, flying search and rescue for the Royal Air Force, so he saved many lives. It wasn’t rocket science to see why I would be attracted to a charismatic and commanding older man like Zac, who also saved lives. But self-awareness and self-control are not the same thing. The fact that you know you are acting like a cliché doesn’t necessarily stop you from doing it.
I was sitting behind the reception desk. Zac brushed his shoulder against mine as he looked with me at the computer screen. I was working on the notes for an eighteen-year-old male with a heart infection that his mother knew everything about, but a sexually transmitted disease that she knew nothing about. Zac was making sure that both were being taken care of.
‘Have dinner with me tonight. I’ll cook for you.’ He was so full of pent-up energy he seemed ready to vibrate, but he kept himself still, in control. He was like that whatever he said or did, though he displayed an unflappable cool in all of his interactions with patients.
‘Your glasses are steamed up.’ I noticed because I wanted to sneak a glance at his extraordinary eyes. One was violent blue. The other was the real wonder. It was a half circle of cobalt in the top of the iris, and a half circle of brown in the bottom.
He took the glasses off and handed them to me, an intimacy. ‘Is that a yes to dinner?’
‘I think so.’ I fiddled with his glasses. ‘I don’t have anything to clean them with.’
He looked at his jacket pocket. I fumbled my hand inside, meeting those bright eyes of his as I did, and found a square of grey microfibre covered in tiny stethoscopes. I wiped the lenses. When I handed them back, he let his skin touch mine and gave me an electric shock.
‘You’d better watch for Mr Rowntree’s girlfriend. If she turns up during visiting hours while his wife is here, he may arrest again.’ Zac was smart enough to make sure nobody heard him say this – it was the kind of talk that could get even a doctor in trouble. A piece of my hair had slipped out of my ponytail. He slid it between his fingers as he walked off to do his ward rounds.
Milly came over. ‘You’re looking hot.’
‘It’s extra warm in here.’ I tried to tuck my hair into the elastic.
‘Not that kind of hot.’ She eyed Zac, who was disappearing into the doctors’ office. ‘Nothing says, I’m a very important cardiologist doing super-cool interventional things like a scrub top and smart-casual trousers.’
I laughed so hard I almost snorted, which encouraged Milly to keep going.
‘That I’m looking beautiful but heroics were needed so I threw this top on outfit is definitely for you. I wish I could dress for impact.’ Milly frowned at the purple dress the staff nurses had to wear. ‘It’s like The Handmaid’s fucking Tale around here, with all this fucked-up colour coding.’
Milly and I kept an incognito blog. We called it Angel’s and Devil’s Book Reviews. Devil found the novels that everyone loved and gave them one star. Angel found the ones everyone hated and gave them five. We had two thousand followers and the most beautiful review blog in the world, because Milly was an artist, so everything about it was visually arresting. She was the most creative person I’d ever met. There was a photo on our ‘About Us’ page, with both of us wearing superhero eye masks. Mine was white, Milly’s red. She had scarlet horns pinned to her blonde hair. I had a white halo. Milly’s hatchet job reviews got twenty times more Likes than my attempts at justice for the unfairly spurned.
‘Please tell me you’re not doing Atwood,’ I said.
‘I am for sure going to do Atwood.’
‘You will make her cry.’ I clutched my heart in mock sorrow.
‘She doesn’t strike me as the crying type.’
I looked down at myself. ‘She for sure would if she had to wear this.’
‘True. Those white polka dots.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Dr Hunter seems into them, though. He’d be perfect for you, except for the fact that he sleeps with everything that moves.’
‘If that’s true,’ Zac said, ‘then why haven’t I slept with you?’
Milly let out a squeak.
Zac’s face was a tight mask. How did he manage to sneak up on us? Normally the sound of his shoes gave him away. Did he change his gait, to avoid the usual noise of the taps on his soles? Or were Milly and I so absorbed in each other we didn’t notice? There was no doubting the clip-clop of his walk as he went off to continue his rounds.
Milly wasn’t finished, though she was no longer smiling. ‘It’s so fucking predictable, your falling for this powerful doctor. It’s pure fantasy. We’re not living in my mum’s collection of Disney films. Tell me you at least know that.’
‘I do know, yes. But I also know I’m not alone.’ I hummed a few lines of the Gaston song from Beauty and the Beast, because Gaston was my nickname for Milly’s boyfriend.
‘You have got to stop calling him Gaston,’ she said. ‘Why do you?’
‘You know why. Because he’s so in love with himself. Like the character in the Disney film. They’re practically identical.’
‘That’s true.’
‘Remind me of his real name, Milly.’
‘You’ve known it since our first day of school.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘Tell me the truth about something.’
‘What?’
‘You know that love letter you got when we were in Reception? We thought it was from a boy in our class, but we never figured out who …’
‘We were four. It was twenty years ago, Milly!’
I’d actually written the letter myself. It said, ‘I love you, Holly’, and the words were surrounded by a heart. It was hardly a work of art, though I suppose it was evidence of how much I loved to write and make things up, even at that age. I’d wanted Milly to think I had a secret admirer. I’d experienced a small sense of triumph that I pulled off that bit of fiction and made someone think it was true. Even then, though, I knew that the fact I could fool her didn’t mean I should. I’d felt a twinge of guilt, too, that it had been so easy.
‘Was it Fergus?’ she said. ‘Do you think he wrote the letter?’
‘God. No. I mean, I don’t know, but I’m sure it wasn’t him.’ I still didn’t want to confess to Milly that I’d faked the letter. At the age of four, I was already practising my tradecraft as well as my writing. But my strongest motive for tricking Milly was my wish to impress her. I’d wanted my brand-new friend and neighbour to think that other people saw me as special.
I tried to joke. ‘Gaston probably wasn’t able to write then, so it couldn’t have been him. But you and I were very advanced.’
She laughed. ‘Again true.’
‘I get that you had a crush on him when we were four. I don’t get what you see in him now.’
‘What I see in Fergus is that he’s always been in my life. That kind of loyalty matters.’
‘Not to him. You shouldn’t hold on to someone because they’re a habit.’
‘Why not? I’ve held on to you.’
As a joke a couple of years ago, Milly bought a book that instructed women on all the right things they should do to get a man to fall madly in love with them, and all the wrong things they shouldn’t. She read out bits to me and the two of us hooted in derision.
On my first date with Zac, I did two of the biggest wrong things. The first was that I didn’t make him take me out to dinner. I went to the house he was renting, nestled in farmland and set a few hundred metres from the coastal path.
After weeks of flirting and brushing past each other, his hands were all over me the instant he closed his front door. I said, ‘All those women. Is it true?’
‘Not any more.’ He was unzipping my dress, sliding it off my shoulders, letting it drop to the floor.
The book put the second wrong thing in a different font, for emphasis. Do not sleep with a man on the first date. Never ever. No matter what. Just don’t.
Zac was pulling me towards a rug in the centre of his sitting room, pushing me onto my back, and we were making love almost in the same movement.
When we got up to go to make dinner, he asked how I liked my steak, and I said, ‘Well done, with horseradish sauce.’ He kissed me and sat me at his marble-topped table and told me he would be right back. I heard him climb the stairs, and a minute later, his footsteps drawing near. But instead of returning to the kitchen, there was what I guessed to be the rattle of keys and the creak of the front door opening and closing, then the roar of his car engine.
Half an hour later, I was reading an article that Zac had left the newspaper folded to, which he’d neatly arranged on the corner of the table. The article was about a huge leak of records from a Panama-based law firm, and how the prime minister’s own father was on the list of rich people who put their money in offshore tax havens.
When Zac walked into the kitchen he nodded approvingly at the article. ‘Impressive thing to pull off.’
I took his hand. ‘Whoever leaked that data is a hero.’
‘Doubtful that he’ll appear on the Honours List.’
I stood and pulled Zac against me. ‘I hope they don’t catch him.’
‘I’m glad you feel that way.’ One of his hands was on the small of my back. The other was taking a jar of horseradish sauce from the pocket of his blazer and putting it on the table. ‘I want you to have your dinner exactly how you like it.’ But we ended up not eating anything.
Zac slept with his body pressed against mine that night, and it was the first time I could remember feeling as if I belonged somewhere. When he went into the bathroom the next morning to get ready for work, I listened carefully for the sound of the water running in the shower, then sat up to peek in the drawer of his bedside table.
There was a photograph of a woman who looked like me, with hair the colour of maple leaves in autumn and eyes the colour of moss. She was on a cushiony reclining chair by a beach with palm trees, sipping from a cocktail glass with carefully arranged edible flowers around the rim. She was wearing a tasselled white cover-up, so filmy I could see her orange bikini beneath it. On her left ankle was an oval mark like a black star sapphire, so distinct I wondered if it was a tattoo. Perhaps it was a birthmark.
‘You found my first wife.’ Zac’s voice came as the quilt slipped from my shoulders, or rather, as he pulled it from me, so it was only when those two things, the words and the movement, happened at once, that I inhaled and looked up to see him standing there, though I could hear that the shower was still on.
‘You startled me.’
He sat on the edge of the bed, a towel round his hips. There were drops of water on his shoulders, and he was dripping on me. He drew a wet finger down the centre of my chest and to my belly button, where he left it.
There was no good story to defuse my being caught with the photograph, so I didn’t tell one. ‘She’s very pretty.’ It occurred to me that other than the incident of Peggy and the apple tree when I was four, I had never knowingly been caught snooping.
‘Not as pretty as you.’
‘That was the right thing to say. Was there a second one?’
‘A second what?’ He pressed one hand over my breast and the other over my throat, tilting me flat again.
‘Wife.’
‘The divorce of the first only came through at the start of this year, so not yet.’ His mouth was against mine. ‘The grounds were desertion. She left me.’
‘When?’
‘Three years ago.’
I thought, but didn’t say, that three years ago wasn’t a great time for me either, with Maxine and that glass table and the line I was stupidly ready to cross.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Jane.’ Zac went on. ‘The end of that marriage – it’s the worst thing that ever happened to me. If you know that now, it will help you to understand.’
‘Understand what?’
‘Understand me. The way I am. The care I take, now, to cherish what I value, to make sure I don’t lose it.’
‘The way you are is perfect.’ I pulled him on top of me.
He laughed. ‘That was the right thing to say too. And to do.’
‘Except for the arrogance thing and the god complex thing.’
‘That not so much.’
‘I find it hard to imagine any woman wanting to leave you.’
‘Good recovery. Smoothly done.’ He kissed me into forgetting about his first wife. When I next opened his bedside drawer, the photograph was gone.
Now The Girl with the Two-Coloured Eye (#ulink_ed93efc2-8892-5bcb-8266-60c56b827436)
Three years later
Bath, Monday, 1 April 2019
I am at work, based now in the paediatric unit of a hospital in Bath. This place is so different from my old job in Cornwall. I am concentrating hard on inputting patient details, when the sound of a crying child makes my attention waver.
A woman is in a deep knee bend beside a pushchair, fumbling with a manicured hand to pick up a stuffed kitty that the child must have thrown. One of those women who spends her morning in designer activewear, then transforms into a lady who lunches. Her expensively jewelled fingers are tipped with blue-black manicured nails that for most mothers would not be compatible with a toddler. Those fingers curl around a takeaway coffee cup that she is struggling not to spill.
The child’s small hand shoots out to grab the edge of the woman’s techno-fabric sleeve. Trying to protect the child from the hot drink, the woman loses her balance and falls. The cup lands beside her, the lid pops off, and the steaming coffee splashes onto the linoleum as well as the woman’s blossom-print leggings. The child stops screaming, arrested by the spectacle of her mother on the floor.
‘Can’t she read?’ Trudy, who is the ward manager’s assistant and senior to me, is hissing from behind her computer screen. ‘Tell her. Get out there now, Helen, and tell her about the sign.’
‘Isn’t it a bit late for that?’
‘Go,’ Trudy says.
In my cardiology ward clerk job, I wore a dull-red smock with off-white polka dots. The spots on this paediatric smock are mint green. The background is strawberry-wafer pink. I will look like a walking cupcake as I approach the polished woman.
‘Okay, okay. I’m going.’ I grab the roll of blue paper towels we keep on a nearby shelf for such emergencies, then emerge from the shelter of the curved reception desk.
I squat in front of the woman. ‘You’re not burnt, I hope?’
She shakes her head no.
I offer her some paper towels and she begins to dab at her clothes while I wipe the floor. Trudy has marched across to direct this little scene and glower at the woman. I wouldn’t have imagined that somebody with curlicue hair like Shirley Temple’s could be intimidating, but Trudy is, despite being a mere one and a half metres tall. I know about Shirley Temple because my grandmother loves her, and endlessly watched her films.
‘No hot drinks allowed in Paediatric Outpatients,’ Trudy says. ‘Did you not see the signs?’
The woman stands, elegant and willowy beside Trudy. ‘I’m sorry. I was desperate for caffeine.’
The child is watching all of this with quiet fascination.
‘Children can be scalded by hot drinks. That is why there is a bin by the entrance,’ Trudy says.
‘I was tired,’ the woman says, ‘but that’s no excuse.’
Trudy softens, but to detect the softening you would need to be accustomed to monitoring every gradient of the human anger scale.
‘Come with me,’ Trudy says to the woman. ‘You need to book your daughter in and have her details checked.’
‘Let me grab her first.’ The woman moves towards the front of the pushchair to unfasten the child, who immediately begins to squirm.
‘Helen will watch her for a minute,’ Trudy says.
I am on my knees, mopping coffee. I straighten up, so my shins are resting on linoleum that is printed to resemble a giant jigsaw puzzle, and my bottom is on my heels. The little girl is staring at me, pursing her lips as if she is about to blow out birthday candles. Her hair is the colour of copper, the same shade mine used to be before I soaked it in black dye. It is baby fine, and her mother has arranged the front in a ponytail-spout above her forehead, to keep it out of her eyes. The spout is a white jet, and adorable on this child, though I wonder if her hair colour is a symptom of whatever medical condition has brought her to the paediatric unit today. Her skin is ivory perfect, though perhaps a bit too pale.
I glance at the mum, whose own hair is dark and artfully highlighted. It reaches the bottom of her neck. She pushes it behind her ears and says to me, ‘Is that okay?
‘Absolutely,’ I say, and she follows Trudy.
The child is frowning, uncertain as she scans for her mother, who is now out of her sightline. I expect her to start to cry again, or scream, or kick. But she doesn’t do any of these things. She blinks her eyes several times, so I look more closely at them. They are surrounded by long, red-gold lashes that match my own, though I wear mascara to hide the colour. One eye is four-leaf clover green, again like mine. The other is blue as a dark sky in the top half-circle, and brown as the earth at the bottom. The only other person I have seen with such an eye is Zac. It is one of the most beautiful things about him. Again, though, I wonder if the child’s eye is a symptom of something medical, the same as her white forelock.
I fantasise about picking her up and holding her close, pretending that she is mine.
To others, I must appear to be a normal woman. I alone know that I am a creature stitched out of pieces that don’t fit and never will, with some of them missing and others stretched too thin and in the wrong shape. My seams show vivid and red like those of Frankenstein’s monster.
I say to the child. ‘You are very pretty. What’s your name?’
She opens her mouth, then smacks her lips together.
I laugh. ‘I bet your name is pretty too. Can you tell me how old you are?’
She shakes her head.
‘Let me try to guess. Are you two?’
She holds up one finger.
Her mother speaks over her shoulder to me while Trudy enters more details into the system. ‘Alice will be two next month.’
‘Ah.’ I throw a smile of thanks over my own shoulder. ‘So you are one right now, but nearly two. That is very big. And you’re so clever to count like that.’
She gives me a slow, serious nod of agreement.
‘So you are Alice. I knew you’d have an extra-pretty name. Do you come from Wonderland?’
Alice nods yes to this question and holds out the stuffed kitty, stretching both arms in front of her in one decisive move.
‘For me?’
Another nod.
I take the kitty and jiggle it until she laughs and snatches it back.
‘I love your dress, Alice.’ It is sunburst orange with pink and purple daisies.
Alice points to my head, and I remember that I took the white pom-pom from the Christmas hat Katarina gave me last December and tied it around my ponytail this morning. I touch the ball of fluffy yarn. ‘Do you like it?’
Alice nods, her eyes wide.
Alice’s mum returns, and I show her where she can wait with Alice. It’s the nicest part of the paediatric unit, with PVC-upholstered benches for parents and boxes of toys for children. As soon as she is freed from her buggy, Alice toddles off in her bright play dress to the toy oven, to make pretend cups of tea and bake pretend cakes, helped by her mum, who kneels beside her.
Trudy is preoccupied at the other end of the desk. The buzzer goes, signalling the arrival of a new patient. The last thing on Trudy’s mind is me – she has way too much to do, hitting the button to release the door lock, then signing in a little boy and answering his parents’ anxious questions.
I shouldn’t do it. I know it is irrational. But that eye. I have to check. A few keystrokes, and I have Alice’s computerised records on the screen. The address is on a very expensive street. When I see that her mother’s name is Eliza Wilmot I get an electric shock and my heart starts to beat faster.
Eliza was the name of a woman I glimpsed with Zac in a hotel bar on a horrible night two years ago. I never learned her surname. Is this the same Eliza? And the child. Could she be Zac’s? I shake my head at the possibility, then stop myself, self-conscious, though when I look around nobody is paying attention.
When I see that Alice was born on May eighteenth, just a few days after my own baby, I take a short, sharp breath. My throat tightens, and I am in the grip of grief and panic. There is a real risk I will cry. Last year, on May fourteenth, I pulled the comforter over my head and didn’t get out of bed at all. I think of my grandmother’s photo in the paper. Has Zac managed to find me, and dragged along a child I never knew about? The coincidences are too strong for me to imagine anything else.
I press on through Alice’s referral letter and medical notes. She has type 1 Waardenburg syndrome, which is a rare genetic condition that can cause hearing loss as well as changes to the pigmentation of the skin, hair, and eyes. So far, the medical notes say, Alice has three manifestations of the condition. The white forelock, the iris that is segmented into two different colours, and eyes that appear widely spaced, though in Alice the latter manifestation is so subtle I hadn’t noticed it. She is new to the area, and today is her initial appointment with the paediatrician who will be monitoring her. Tomorrow, I see, she is going to audiology for a hearing test.
For the first time, it occurs to me that Zac might have this condition, too. Could that be why he shaves his head, morning and night, to hide the white forelock? He led me to think the shaving was an aesthetic choice. That he preferred no hair at all to a bald spot. When I asked him about his eye, he said he was made that way. I try to picture his face. I think, though I am not certain, that perhaps his eyes, too, are a little widely spaced. But why would he keep the condition a secret, and try to cover it up, if he did have it? As soon as I silently pose the question, I know the answer. Zac hates anything that makes him appear vulnerable.
A sudden influx of newly arrived parents and children overwhelms me and Trudy. I catch sight of Alice’s mother, hovering nearby, handing Alice a biscuit and a sippy cup, then checking her phone. When the queue has finally cleared, she comes over to me. ‘Thank you so much for your help earlier.’
I give her an it-was-nothing shrug. Does she know who I am? Did Zac send her here? I can’t decide. The appointment is certainly genuine – Alice clearly needs it. I am praying my face isn’t drained of colour when I say, ‘Your daughter is gorgeous.’
‘She is, isn’t she?!’ Without looking at it, she grabs a flyer about MMR from a pile stacked on the counter, rummages in her bag for a pen, scribbles something on the flyer. ‘I’m Eliza. And this is Alice.’
It’s as if I have a hot sword running through the centre of my chest to the bottom of my stomach.
‘And you’re Helen, aren’t you?’ I nearly jump at her knowing my name, but then she lowers her voice and says, ‘The scary woman called you that.’
I manage a laugh. ‘Ah. Yes.’ I lift the flap in the reception counter to let myself through. I crouch in front of Alice. ‘Goodbye, Alice.’ I put out my hand, which she takes and shakes, imitating grown-ups. She holds her arms out, so that I lean closer in, and she giggles and tries to slide my glasses from my nose, then giggles some more. This child looks so like Zac, but his strong features are delicate and beautiful in her face.
‘I don’t normally do this.’ Eliza lifts her shoulders in pretend embarrassment. ‘I mean, pick up new friends in hospital clinics. But we’ve not long moved here, and I barely know anyone. Would you like to meet for coffee? I wrote down my name and number.’ She offers me the MMR sheet.
I take the sheet. ‘Coffee would be lovely.’ It is quiet here, a brief lull, and Trudy has gone on a break. Nobody will notice that I do not dutifully tell my would-be friend Eliza that I am not supposed to do this sort of thing with the parents of patients. I smile with what I think is perfect composure, though the fizzing electrical noises that are a constant in this place seem to be bleeping and pinging from inside my own body.
That night, I cannot sleep. I squirm beneath sheets that are sticky with my own sweat, feeling as alone as a lighthouse keeper trapped on a rock island in a storm so terrible no relief boat can get to him. I grab the phone from the floor by my bed and dial Peggy, with my number blocked and the mute button engaged, my heart beating so much faster than the ringtone.
Peggy is still half-asleep, sounding scared, thinking something has happened to Milly, repeating the word ‘Hello’ over and over, and Milly’s name as if it were a question. I can hear James in the background, asking who it is and what has happened. I disconnect, telling myself it was worth it just to hear their voices after almost two years. I feel dreadful that I’ve frightened them, but tell myself they will soon discover that Milly is fine.
I pull off the quilt and drag myself from the single bed beneath the crypt-like brick archway I’d painted bright yellow. I sit in a rocking chair I’d stained deep teal, and I sew the tiniest of tiny baby clothes for the most premature of premature babies. I am one of a handful of volunteers who make these so that hospitals can keep a few on hand. And though I hope they will never be worn, I know all too well that they will be. I prick my finger with the needle and feel certain that somewhere out in the world a bad thing is happening.
Then Human Asset (#ulink_2cb12b8f-c9a5-59be-b652-55ef34415598)
Two and a half years earlier
Cornwall, 14 October 2016
It was the Mermaid of Zennor who prompted my move into Zac’s rented farmhouse two months after we first slept together. We made the decision when I took him to see her in the village church.
The Mermaid is six centuries old, and carved into the side of a little bench, holding her looking glass and comb. The dark wood is scarred and scratched and discoloured. Some of it is peeling away. She has a rounded belly and breasts that you can’t help but want to touch, though countless hands have smoothed her features away through the years.
Zac and I knelt side by side and trailed our fingers over the Mermaid as I told him her story.
What happens to her is nothing like Hans Christian Andersen’s version or the Disney film. She is enchanted by the beautiful voice of a local man, drifting out of the church towards the waves. And it is the man who then goes to live with her in the kingdom of the Merpeople. She doesn’t need to give up her tail and grow legs to have a life with him on land.
Milly and I had always planned to write a book about her, with my words and her illustrations.
‘You’re my mermaid,’ Zac said, as soon as I finished the story. ‘That is what I want to do for you.’ He knew I would never want to leave Cornwall, though before he met me he’d viewed his job there as a brief stop on his starry route to someplace else. ‘We’ll stay here,’ he said, ‘in your world.’ I was moved by that. And in his debt.
That was four months ago. Since then, we’d spent just three nights apart, when he attended a medical congress in Moldova towards the end of the summer. I’d missed him during that trip, despite the fact that living with a man for the first time wasn’t entirely easy for me. My grandmother brought me up with a strange mixture of regulation that I didn’t miss and freedom that I did. I felt so visible, so watched and accountable, when before I could disappear for what seemed endless stretches of time. But none of that was Zac’s fault.
I’d come to my special place to consider all this. It was where I liked to read and think and scribble hospital stories in my secret journal, which I kept hidden from Zac. I was wearing his parka, hugging it around myself, and sipping from the thermos of coffee I brought with me. The bench that I was sitting on was erected by the town soon after my parents died. The tarnished plaque behind my back was engraved with the words, In Remembrance of Squadron Leader Edward Lawrence and His Wife, Matilda Lawrence.
The bench sat on a section of the coastal path my parents had often walked together, above a gorge in the cliff that made a kind of waterfall down to the rocks below. Usually the waterfall sounded like thunder, and the sea churned and heaved its foam. On that October day, though, the waterfall was a trickle of gentle music, and the sea was so calm I could see the rocks below its glassy surface. Already it was past the high season. There were few other walkers despite the unseasonally mild autumn morning.
It was a short walk to that isolated stretch of the coastal path and I made it whenever I could, as if in my parents’ footsteps. Zac’s rented house was a few hundred metres inland. I thought of my bright charity shop clothes, stuffed in his drawers and wardrobe, mixed with the sleek designer wear he organised with military precision. The tall, narrow house I grew up in next door to Milly and James and Peggy was virtually abandoned, but I understood Zac’s reluctance to live so close to them.
I pictured my childhood bed in the attic, and its bright pink quilt dotted with red poppies. That bed seemed to fade. Instead, I saw the new one I shared with Zac, the white sheets thrown on the floor, and the two of us in it the night before.
My clothes were off, and Zac’s hands seemed to be everywhere, and I reached towards the drawer in the bedside table where I kept my diaphragm, and he caught my arm before I could get to it and pinned my wrists above my head and held me down and kissed any words away, and it was impossible to make him wait any longer, though I was uncertain about whether I wanted him to, and in a haze of confusion over what had just happened, my head foggy from too much wine, and my body seeming not to be my own.
There was a noise, coming from the coastal path, and my replay of the night before blew away. A figure was striding towards me, dressed in baggy walking trousers and a sweatshirt, wearing a small backpack. Her hair was hidden beneath a khaki bush hat, her eyes shielded by dark sunglasses.
I aimed a polite ‘Morning’ vaguely in her direction, hoping that she would walk on and leave me with my thoughts. Instead, she lowered herself onto the bench beside me. Because I had arranged myself in the middle, she seemed too close. I slid over, until my right side was pressed against the wooden arm. I studied the copy of Jane Eyre in my lap, trying to signal that I wasn’t interested in talking.
‘Good book?’ The voice was familiar. I looked up to see the woman remove her sunglasses. There was the same indigo eyeliner, the same thick mascara, the same crimson lipstick. Her hands were gloved, but I was betting the nails were scarlet.
‘Yes.’ It was a present from Zac, a beautiful old edition, given because he knew how much the novel meant to me.
Maxine perched her sunglasses back on her nose, then extracted a clear plastic bag from her backpack, which contained pastries. ‘Croissant?’
I squinted at her. ‘No. Thank you.’
‘Bottle of water?’
‘Again, no. Thank you.’
It had been three and a half years since I crashed out of my final interview for MI5, and her appearance was so unexpected I wondered if I was dreaming. Why on earth was she seeking me out after all that time, and offering me breakfast?
‘I’d like to talk to you.’ She seemed to be answering my unspoken question. She looked out at the sea with her usual indifference and took a bite of a croissant. ‘Stale,’ she said, tossing it behind her without looking.
I stifled a laugh. ‘We had to do a role-play exercise, during that residential assessment. We pretended to be agent handlers making an approach to a potential informant. “Always provide amenities.” That was part of your script for how to recruit an agent. Are you trying to recruit me, Maxine?’
To my astonishment, she said, ‘Yes. I am.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘I’m completely serious. You’re in a position to help us. I’ve come to ask if you will.’
I had fantasised about Maxine seeking me out, Maxine telling me she’d got it wrong, Maxine saying that getting rid of me was the great misjudgement of her career, Maxine confessing that she – that they – needed me.
‘Are you offering me a proper job with the Security Service?’
‘You have access to intelligence that we need, and we know you’re skilful enough to get it for us.’
‘No you don’t. You don’t think that about me at all. I seem to remember that flattery is part of that script for recruiting informants, too.’
‘It is, as a matter of fact. But I do think you’re skilful – there was only that one critical flaw that ended the possibility of your joining us.’
‘Please spare me the flattery. I’d have thought that if you wanted a lab report or a patient’s medical record you could reach right in and grab them.’
‘That isn’t what this is about. But technically speaking, yes, you would be a Covert Human Intelligence Source, or agent – what the cousins call a human asset. I much prefer their term. You already know, Holly, that a human asset collects information for us, then passes it on.’
Her words stabbed away the mad bit of hope I’d somehow conjured. What Maxine wanted – what they wanted – was to use me. I was little more than a drone to them, and would never be properly inside MI5.
‘And you would be my handler?’
‘Yes. I would have responsibility for your security and welfare. Something we take very seriously.’
‘I bet. So you see me the same way you see a drug dealer who gets to stay out of jail if he reports on the bad guys who are above him in the chain. Or a prostitute who you’ll pay if she gives you information about her pimp. Or someone working for a company with trade secrets you’re after.’
‘Those aren’t the only kinds of agents we recruit.’
‘Nice of you to say. I’d be a rubbish informant, and I don’t have access to any intelligence you could possibly be interested in.’ I concentrated on the soft slap of the water as it gently rolled in and out.
‘You have integrity – the qualities that made you want to join us in the first place.’
‘I meant it about skipping the flattery section of your script. You don’t think I have a single atom of integrity. You remember why I bombed my MI5 interview.’
She ignored this unseemly reminder with the tact of a hostess managing an awkward guest. ‘We are authorised to make arrangements of this nature, Holly, in order to detect or prevent a crime, protect national security, or in the interests of the economic well-being of the UK.’
‘Is that some kind of legal document they made you memorise?’
‘Again, you are correct.’
‘What is this really about, Maxine?’
‘Your new boyfriend is Zachary Hunter.’
I was trailing my index finger over the gold lettering on Jane Eyre’s cover, then tracing the edge of the oval portrait of Charlotte between the title and the author’s name. ‘You obviously know that he is.’
‘So you know about his ex-wife?’
‘I know she left him.’ I followed a fishing boat with my eyes, a speck whose ghost-shape outline I could still see, imprinted from when it had been closer to land.
‘Does he know where she is?’
‘Why don’t you ask him?’
‘It’s been tried. The experiment was not successful.’
I shrugged. ‘Well why should he know? The fact that she’s not in his life is pretty normal, given the circumstances. That’s how it is with most people after a relationship ends. Not to mention the fact he divorced her on the grounds of desertion.’
If Maxine were given to expressiveness, I couldn’t help but feel that she would be rolling her eyes. ‘She’s classified as a missing person. Did he tell you that the police questioned him about her disappearance?’
There was a trickle of sweat down my spine. ‘The police always question previous partners. There can’t have been any evidence against him or they’d have charged and tried him.’ Then, the obvious thing, the thing I should have asked first, came to me. ‘Why do you care about this?’
‘I care about a missing woman.’
‘No you don’t. Even if you did, it’s not the kind of thing MI5 gets involved in.’
‘Believe what you like. You know it isn’t protocol for us to explain the reasons for what we do to potential informants with no security clearance. Do you know her name?’
‘Jane.’ I didn’t elaborate on my failure to discover her surname. I’d tried a few Internet searches for her under Zac’s but found nothing. I hadn’t wanted to press him to talk about her, when I could see how painful he found it.
‘Jane Miller,’ Maxine said, as if she guessed that my knowledge was limited. ‘Let me give you some facts.’
‘I don’t want your facts.’
‘Hear me out. Okay?’
I didn’t say yes, but I didn’t stop her, either.
‘Born August fourth, 1980, in London. Raised there by a single mother. Father was American – died in 2008 – Jane never knew him, unless seeing him as a baby counts. The father moved back to the US after Jane’s mother divorced him – their relationship ended before Jane’s first birthday. The mother’s been dead since 1998.’
I couldn’t quell my own curiosity, though I tried to sound bored. ‘What was – is – Jane’s profession?’
‘Social worker.’
‘Maybe she pissed somebody off. Maybe you should be looking at that.’
‘She stopped working a few years before she disappeared.’
‘What was her area?’
‘The elderly – not a speciality where she’d be likely to attract a lot of hate.’
‘You didn’t tell me the names of her parents.’ I pulled Jane Eyre closer, across my tummy, as if to shield myself.
‘Jane’s mother was Isabelle Miller. Her father was Philip Veliko. Philip remarried soon after he returned to the US and had a son with his new wife. Frederick.’
‘Would the father’s new family have reason to resent Jane?’
‘Jane inherited some money from her father, but the second wife predeceased him and Frederick didn’t dispute Jane’s inheritance – everything was split equally between Frederick and Jane. No known grievances or hostile behaviour from any of them.’
‘Was Jane in contact with her brother?’ Jane Eyre rose and fell as I breathed.
‘As far as we can tell, only after their father’s death, not before.’
‘Well, you should still look at the brother. Most people would be pretty pissed off if some sibling they didn’t even know swanned in and took half their inheritance.’
‘Listen to me, Holly. Jane Miller is like you. And like your friend in the book.’ Briefly, lightly, she tapped Jane Eyre with a gloved finger. ‘She found herself living with a man whose closets were filled with skeletons. And she found, in the end, that she had to look in them. You are already living the perfect cover story. You don’t need to change a thing.’
Round and round my finger went. ‘My life isn’t a cover story. My life is my life. My life is real.’ I shook my head. ‘Normally, you ask someone inside a government organisation to betray their country in some way. In my case, you want me to betray my boyfriend, be an informant on my boyfriend. No way. Not happening.’
‘There are countless kinds of intelligence targets. You know that. We want any information that can help us find Jane and make sure she’s safe.’
‘Zac doesn’t make women unsafe. Zac saves people’s lives. Besides which, making sure women are safe is not your core business.’
‘Our core business is complicated.’
‘Then perhaps you should try explaining it in more detail to your potential agents. You might find they’d cooperate more enthusiastically.’
‘You’re a little different than most, more informed than is typical, given your history with us. I’m telling you everything I can. More than usual.’
‘Flattering and confiding all in one move – you’re a master of that recruitment script, but it’s not working. Zac wouldn’t hurt anybody. He’s the most loving, protective, generous man I’ve ever known.’
‘That’s a lot of adjectives.’
‘I don’t need you to critique my language. I finished my English degree.’
‘If you’re right about him, then looking more closely can only show that.’
I put Jane Eyre in my bag, out of her sight and reach. ‘Why on earth would I do this for you? What are you even trying to buy me with? I know you normally think of incentives when you’re recruiting an agent. What possible incentive would I have?’
She allowed herself a smile. ‘Ideological, in your case. I won’t patronise you by not admitting that. It’s your value system. You’d be protecting other women. Helping Jane. As I said, you’d be helping Zac, too.’
‘He wouldn’t see it that way. This is a wasted journey for you. There is no way I will do this.’
‘Look. Here’s another incentive for you, but maybe one that isn’t so easy for you to admit. I’m talking about your curiosity. You are Pandora, Holly. It’s in your blood, that impulse to look where you shouldn’t. My guess is that you’ve continued to do it, even without the legitimacy that the job would have given you.’
She was right, but I wasn’t about to admit it to her. ‘I’m not going to spy on Zac. Not for anybody and certainly not for you.’
‘If he’s telling you the truth, you’ve nothing to lose. You’d be helping him, removing him from suspicion. If you’re wrong, wouldn’t it be better for you to know it? Because if you are wrong, you may be living with a modern-day Bluebeard.’
I shook my head, trying to use reason to fight the tightening in my stomach. ‘It doesn’t make sense. This isn’t the kind of thing the Security Service involves itself in. We aren’t talking about national security, here. What aren’t you telling me?’
‘We work extremely closely with the police on many operations and investigations.’
‘That’s empty rhetoric and you know it.’
‘Do you know what Jane looks like?’
I thought again of the photograph I found of her on the first night I slept with Zac. I’d searched for it several times since, without luck. ‘Yes.’
‘Then you know you resemble her. Same height and build – you’re a couple of centimetres taller, but not much. Same colouring, that unusual strawberry blonde hair you both have. Doesn’t that disturb you?’
‘Having a preferred type isn’t a sign that a man’s a psychopath and a murderer.’
‘Holly. I need to ask if Zac has ever done anything to hurt you.’
‘Of course not.’ I tugged Zac’s parka down at the wrists. They were slightly red and swollen, from where he’d pinned them above my head the previous night, one of those fine lines that you sometimes crossed during sex, when you were carried away. ‘But despite the fact you obviously disagree, rather than rescue me from him you want to send me back in.’
‘I’m confident there’s nothing I can say or do right now to keep you away from him. You don’t want to be rescued. So, given that this is where we find ourselves, it would help us a great deal if you would keep an eye out.’
‘No.’
‘You don’t need to do much. We can start small. If you come across any objects of Jane’s, tell us about them in as much detail as you can. Give them to us, if at all possible.’
‘It’s pointless. Not just because I said no and I mean it. Zac doesn’t even have any of her things.’
‘You might still stumble on something. We’d like to know of any communications Zac makes, especially if they are connected in any way to Jane. Who are his contacts? How does he get in touch with them? Email? Text? Phone? Laptop? Does he have any social media accounts? Maybe under a user name that people wouldn’t link to him? What trips does he make? If he ever happens to leave a device powered on you might be able to look. See if you can guess his password. Pay attention to where he’s going, who he’s meeting, if anyone ever visits him at work …’
‘Those are disgusting things to do to someone you care about, someone who’s trusted you and let you into their life.’
‘Do what you are comfortable with, then. What you can. You understand Zac. You’re intimate with him. You see the ins and outs of how he operates in ways we can’t.’
‘The answer’s no.’
‘It won’t kill you to think about it, and to be gently watchful while you do.’
‘Again … no.’
‘Let me ask you something.’
‘What?’
‘Did you ever tell Zac you tried to join us?’
‘No. Why would I?’ My voice cracked. ‘It was humiliating. Do you ever consider what it means to someone to work so hard to try to join you, to want to devote herself to that, to protecting her country, and then to discover she’s not good enough?’ I was surprised by my own honesty, by my nakedness and exposure.
‘I do. And it was wise of you to keep it to yourself. Did you tell anyone else?’
‘Only Milly and James and Peggy. As I disclosed when I applied.’
‘Again wise – I suggest you keep it that way. But just in case you change your mind about doing this for us, let me explain a bit more about how it can work.’
‘I’m not going to change my mind. I’ve said no so many times in the last few minutes I’ve lost count. No means no these days.’
‘I know that. I respect that. But it won’t hurt you to hear me out. It doesn’t obligate you to do anything. I’ve come a long way to see you – you can at least listen.’
‘I don’t remember guilt and emotional blackmail as part of the recruitment script.’
‘Well they are. Can you give me a few more minutes?’
All I gave her was a shrug, but she seized on it with a pleased nod.
‘Good,’ she said, and though I punctuated her sentences with shakes of my head, she told me that my identity would be protected, and that any written records would not be available except to a small number of those who needed access, and that any information about my own wrongdoing would not be acted upon.
‘There is no wrongdoing. Because I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘We know that.’ But still she went on, telling me about the secret channels through which I could contact her to pass information. And I couldn’t help but listen, because the tradecraft she was describing, the basic techniques for surveillance and communications, fascinated me too much to stop her altogether or simply leave. She told me how to speak through classified advertisements, and about a dead letter drop she would set up near the bench where we were sitting. She mentioned a safe house, in case I ever needed to get away quickly.
‘You really have wasted your time and wasted your breath,’ I said, when she finally stopped.
‘We’ll see.’ Without another word, she got up to retrace her steps along the path, vanishing as suddenly as she appeared. She moved silently, and I realised that the rustle she’d made when she first approached was no accident. Nothing Maxine said or did ever was.
Now The Two Tunnels (#ulink_3a00187c-bf53-56db-8d29-39e566219c83)
Two and a half years later
Bath, Tuesday, 2 April 2019
My head is filled with the little girl who visited the hospital yesterday. Each time I try to explain away her appearance there, I fail. I look over my shoulder, half-expecting to see Zac.
I am on my morning run. The route is already in my bones. My body moves along it without effort, though I barely slept last night. Hearing Peggy and James’s voices comforted me, but agitated me too. For so long, I have had to hide myself from the few people in the world I love, all the time fearing that Zac would turn up. Now, there is a high probability that he has, as well as the distinct possibility that he dragged a wife and child along with him.
But I am not going to sit around waiting for them to pop out at me again. Or for him to. I added Eliza to my telephone contacts last night. ‘Madam likes to be up early,’ she had said, ‘and my husband’s usually out before the sun, so call any time.’ I grab my phone from the pocket in the waistband of my leggings and use a voice command to do just that.
As we speak, Eliza clatters breakfast things and tries not to sound stressed, while Alice chatters in the background. We arrange to meet in the park for a quick coffee tomorrow morning, before I go into work. ‘Getting Alice out early into fresh air would be good,’ she says. There is a screech from Alice, and a crash of what sounds like glass onto tiles. ‘As you can hear.’ Eliza breaks off, though she hurriedly promises to bring the coffees.
I put the phone away and speed up. The sun is cutting through the pre-dawn mist and the bluebells are out already. Despite the two miles I have already run, and the call, I am not at all out of breath. I had to work hard to get this strong after it happened.
I turn into the disused railway line, going faster still, then enter the first tunnel. The dimness swallows me. The air seems still and dead, and smells of damp. Soon, though, the motion sensors begin, the flashes and sounds activated by my movement – Milly would love this. A circle of blue light surrounded by a white halo blazes at me from a window-shaped cut-out in the wall of stone, then a blast of violin music that is louder than my breathing as I speed up. But the tunnel is filled with ghosts, as if Eliza and Alice brought them along to the hospital and released them to chase after me.
I emerge into fresh, cool air, and the song of birds. There is the magic glimpse of a kingfisher in the gap between the two tunnels, by the river below. After the one that froze here last Christmas, I want so badly to take it as a good sign, but can’t bring myself to.
I enter the second tunnel, leaving the sunshine behind me again. When I come out the other end, I think of a baby’s first breaths, gasped in the midst of all that new brightness and noise. I try to envisage a baby’s birth as it should be, because the bad outcomes are the exceptions and it is important to keep that in mind.
‘Helen.’
I halt as if somebody has jerked me backwards. I know that voice, but I blink several times, as if to be sure of what I am seeing.
There is no doubt. The woman standing before me has stepped straight out of my nightmares.
It’s not the right time yet. Getting you out the right way will take time. We need to set things up properly.
It has been almost two years since I’ve seen her, and Zac is a better candidate for the starring role in my bad dreams. But Maxine is the one who comes to me in the night, just as she did on my last night in hospital, the sheets clinging, cold and damp from my sweat.
Maxine has this way of never seeming to look at anyone or anything, her eyes downcast, her shoulders rounded. She is droopy. That is the word I often think of when I observe her. Your eyes would slide over her as if she were the most uninteresting piece of grey furniture ever made. And that is exactly what she wants your eyes to do.
‘It’s good,’ she says, ‘how readily you respond to Helen. Presumably Graham is natural to you too, now?’
‘Yes.’ I hadn’t been out of breath, but now I am.
Maxine’s blouse is elegant in midnight-blue silk, but untucked and sloppy. Her loose black trousers disguise how slim and dangerously fit she is. She is slouchy, as ever. Only the unfortunate know what it means when she straightens her back, something she does rarely. I am one of that select group.
‘You look different.’ That flat flat flatness of her voice. The pretence of indifference, as if I am a neighbour she sees every day, walking up and down the path to the next-door house.
‘That’s hardly surprising.’
Time seems to spool backwards, speeding past her twilight swoop on me in the hospital almost two years ago – it’s too painful to freeze time there. It rushes further back, past her ambush on the cliffs two and a half years ago. Time stops six years ago, on the day I flunked out, sitting in that white-light room with the exposing glass table between us.
You’re like that puppy who was too friendly to be a police dog, she’d said. We don’t recruit good-looking people. You need to look like Jane Average, but you’re too vain to let yourself look that way.
She has left the rear door of the car open, the engine purring but the driver invisible behind dark windows and hidden by the partition that keeps his section of the car separate. We both know it is no accident that she has crossed my path. Nothing is ever an accident with Maxine.
‘Why are you here?’ I channel her flat indifference, though I am pretty sure I can guess. As repellent as she is to me, it is looking as though I am going to need her help.
‘Have you done anything to give yourself away?’
The question is a confirmation more than a surprise, but the air still puffs out of my stomach. ‘My grandmother …’ My voice trails off. ‘It’s possible, yes.’
She starts towards the car, parked where the road ends and the tunnel opens. ‘Come with me.’ It is as if I’d seen her yesterday, to hear her boss me around.
‘Are you having me watched? Is that how you found me this morning?’
‘Not necessary. You seem to have forgotten that I already knew where you were.’ Do I imagine that there is a flash of something behind her eyes? Maxine opens the car door. ‘There’s something I need you to see. It’s for your protection.’
‘Excuse me if my confidence in your ability to protect me isn’t great.’
‘It’s not as if you have anywhere important to go. Or anyone to go to.’
I say nothing. I keep my face indifferent, channelling Maxine herself. But she is right. Other than my grandmother, there is nobody.
‘Trust me,’ Maxine says.
‘I’ve tried that before. It didn’t work out great.’
‘As far as I can tell, it still hasn’t.’
‘Do you have children, Maxine?’
She pretends not to hear.
‘I asked you a question.’
‘If I answer, will you come?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have children.’
‘How many?’
‘I agreed to answer your first question, not a series of them.’
‘How many?’ I say again.
‘Two.’ She looks so sorry for me. ‘I have two.’
Then The Plague Pit (#ulink_dc36fb12-be2e-58aa-8365-b4b474d2963b)
Two years and five months earlier
Cornwall, 13 November 2016
Since Maxine’s failed attempt to recruit me four weeks ago, I’d plugged Jane’s name, and her mother’s and father’s and brother’s, into every Internet search engine I could think of. There was no social media for any of them, though I found a record of Jane’s birth in London on 4 August 1980 and her marriage to Zac in September 2006.
I also found her father’s obituary, which confirmed what Maxine said about his wife pre-deceasing him and his son Frederick surviving him. Two other things struck me when I read it. First, that Philip Veliko had been a property developer, and second, that the obituary didn’t mention Jane at all.
The Remembrance Sunday ceremony always started at the outdoor war memorial in the square, then moved into the church. I was getting ready to leave for this, twisting up the front of my hair and fastening it with a jade comb, when Zac slipped his hands beneath my knitted dress. Before I knew it, he was tipping me back onto the bed and I was pulling him on top of me and there was a pile of sea-green wool on the floor.
Afterwards, when I stood in front of the looking glass to try again with my hair, he pressed against me from behind, wrapped his arms around me, and rested his hands on my belly. He whispered that he knew my period was two weeks late and my breasts were bigger, which he loved. I wondered that he could know these things, that he could be watching my body that carefully.
I had loved my brief time of hugging the secret of a pregnancy close and just for me. My breasts had been tingling for the past few days. Little electric sparks shot through them. I’d planned to share the news with him tomorrow, on his birthday.
So I said my period had a tendency to skip around, and my breasts were the same as ever, and it was too early to tell, and he smiled at our reflections and said, ‘Then we will see.’
When Zac and I arrived at the war memorial, we found Peggy and James waiting for us close to the Cross of Sacrifice. Peggy invariably got there early on Remembrance Sunday, because she liked to have a good view of the ceremony. She was resplendent in a white fur Cossack hat and scarlet coat.
Zac put his mouth by my ear. ‘She looks like a giant poppy,’ he said, and I nearly sprayed the mouthful of the takeaway coffee I’d just sipped.
James stood beside Peggy, his silver hair sticking up, straight-backed as ever in his black greatcoat and red scarf. He was his usual quiet self, and gave me his usual kiss on the cheek with his usual near-smile, and made his usual half-joke that he was still waiting for me to come back to the pharmacy to work for him again. Peggy put on a display of exaggerated patience as she allowed James to finish, then threw her arms around me.
Zac reached into his coat pocket and produced a wooden cross. Two names were already written on it, in his precise, perfectly controlled lettering. Edward Lawrence, RAF. Matilda Lawrence.
‘You are lovely.’ I put a hand to his cheek. ‘Thank you.’
‘That was thoughtful.’ Peggy tried to smile at Zac but managed only a stiff movement of the upper corners of her mouth. She beamed warmth democratically on everyone – waiters, people behind supermarket tills, neighbours. Zac was the one person for whom she could muster nothing more than cold politeness.
Zac guided me to the Cross of Sacrifice, and I knelt to place the small cross at its base, among the others, before I rose and stepped backwards.
‘What was his rank?’ Zac asked.
‘Squadron Leader. He was a commissioned officer, but he wasn’t born into it. He grew up on my grandparents’ dairy farm. He was young when he died. Thirty-three. They both were. Did I tell you he flew search and rescue helicopters?’
‘You did. You should be very proud.’
As I honoured my military father and civilian mother, I thought of my grandmother, and what she constantly said about my parents’ deaths. She, of course, had a conspiracy theory, and believed that the car accident that killed them wasn’t an accident at all but made to look like one because my father knew something he shouldn’t. Whenever she dropped her dark hints I tried to quiz her, only for her to clam up. Sometimes, I thought my obsession with joining the Security Service was driven by my wish to get access to whatever hidden information there might be about this. I remembered Maxine’s seemingly innocuous questions about their deaths during that awful interview.
Zac put an arm around me, and we slowly walked the few metres to join Peggy and James. Peggy said, ‘So you’re living above the plague pit, Zac?’
He looked bewildered, which was not a look Zac often wore.
‘Didn’t Holly tell you?’ Peggy said.
‘No.’ He managed a joke. ‘I ought to ask for a discount on the rent.’ He turned to me, as if for help. ‘Holly?’
‘It’s just a story,’ I said.
‘You know it isn’t,’ Peggy said.
‘Are you going to tell me?’ Zac’s eyes were glittering at mine.
‘Hmm. I’m thinking I have to say yes to that.’ So I began. ‘In the mid-fifteenth century, five hundred people from the town were lost to the plague. The burial records for that period don’t survive, and the plague victims aren’t in the graveyard.’ A paper poppy petal, torn away from the body of the flower, floated above us, lifted by the wind. ‘So here is the question. Where were the poor souls put?’
‘Souls?’ Zac raised an eyebrow.
‘The thinking is that the bodies were loaded onto carts and taken along the coffin path. Then they were dumped into a pit. This was three kilometres along the coast, but slightly inland.’
‘Where you are.’ Peggy was fingering the cross that dangled from a silvery chain around her neck. ‘To rid the town of contagion.’ She glanced up at the smoky-blue sky, as if for heavenly support. ‘The pit is on the land behind your farmhouse. Your back garden, as a matter of fact. Nobody wants to live there. It’s supposed to be unlucky.’
‘Sounds like a load of superstitious …’ Zac paused to find a more polite term than whatever he’d been about to say. ‘It’s as likely as mermaids.’
Peggy’s eyes narrowed. Her nostrils flared. To Peggy, an accusation of superstition was as bad as one of devil worship.
‘You know that mermaids are real.’ I was trying to tease the tension away. ‘I told you. You can’t live in St Ives and not believe in mermaids.’
‘True.’ He pulled my head against his chest. We were both thinking of the rough-hewn and time-scarred Mermaid Bench, the two of us holding hands as we knelt by the Mermaid in a kind of pledge to each other and to her.
‘Holly’s our little Ariel,’ Peggy said.
Zac gave me some serious side-eye at this Disneyfication. I squeezed his hand, trying to communicate silent understanding as well as a plea for him not to start on a critique of the ‘sugary sentimentalism’ that he detested.
I smiled at Peggy. I knew that she was picturing me and Milly, still tiny girls in pink nightdresses, snuggled against her during one of our countless sleepovers, the three of us eating popcorn and watching the Disney video.
There was room in the world for all kinds of mermaids.
Milly was gesturing for me to join her near the open church door, where she was standing by Gaston, whose hair was slicked into a ponytail. He broke up with her a few months ago, but Milly couldn’t get over it. She continued to sleep with him, and whenever they had sex it gave her false hope that he’d changed his mind.
As I looked at Gaston, I was again struck by how strongly he resembled the character from the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, which was another of the films that Milly and I watched with Peggy when we were children. That one was our favourite, because Belle was a passionate reader, like me and Milly.
Again Milly was beckoning me, this time even more frantically, but I shook my head no, not wanting to leave Zac when he was so palpably uncomfortable.
‘Milly needs you, sweetheart.’ Peggy was tugging at my arm. I looked helplessly at Zac as Peggy prised my hand out of his, deliberately ignoring the don’t-you-dare-leave-me-with-them look he was shooting at me. She gave me a push towards Milly that practically sent me flying.
Milly was in tight jeans and sheepskin boots, a cream beanie hat covering her bright hair, seeming to know everyone, kissing old and young alike but making sure all the time that she kept within a metre of Gaston.
I took a lock of her hair between my fingers, to peel off the purple acrylic gloop that had dried on it. ‘You’ve found some time to paint this morning?’
She was glowing when she nodded yes. ‘At last. I got up early.’ She was so beautiful and cleverly funny that almost every man I ever met would want to go out with her. But she didn’t seem to know this.
‘I’m glad.’ I noticed Zac, pushing through the crowd to get to me.
‘Hi, Holly Dolly.’ Gaston’s voice was so booming that Zac sent a look his way that would vaporise other mortal beings.
‘Hello, Gaston.’ At least nobody could say I only used the name behind his back. Milly had given up on trying to stop me. I’d known since we were four that he would hurt her. Now that he actually had, I wanted to punch him in his rock-hard gut.
‘You know I consider that name a compliment, don’t you?’ He insisted on kissing me on the cheek, nearly choking me with his aftershave. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t love me.’
‘I really don’t.’
Zac had reached me at last, and curled an arm tightly around my waist, pulling me close to his side. The gulls were wheeling above our heads.
‘The parade’s about to start, Holly.’ He aimed us in the direction of the War Memorial, but the crowd had grown so thick we couldn’t get close to Peggy and James. ‘I came here to support you, and you repay me by sneaking off to Milly and her boyfriend.’
‘Ex-boyfriend, now.’
‘I don’t care who he is.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t sneak, I don’t need to pay you, I didn’t mean to upset you, and I can promise you that talking to Gaston is not fun.’
‘Gaston? I hate those Disney names. You’re too intelligent for that.’
The increasing decibel level as the marching band approached saved me from the need to say more, because the outdoor part of the ceremony was finally underway, and the buglers were sounding.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old …
My voice joined with the others, and I could feel Zac’s irritation melting away. He encased both of my hands inside his, and kept them that way through the two-minute silence.
As we walked from the outdoor memorial to the church that towered over it, he whispered, ‘I’m sorry, Holly. I feel left out, sometimes, of your life here. You’re such a part of things.’
‘You are too.’
‘Am I?’
‘Of course. It matters to me that you want to live here. I know you’re doing it for me. I’m moved by that.’
We processed into the packed church together, and slipped into a pew at the rear. The pillars were garlanded in ribbons that had been strung with poppies. Zac did not bow his head for prayers or recite the Act of Penitence or sing any of the hymns, and certainly not ‘God Save the Queen’.
After the service, he held my hand as we joined the parade, following the band and swinging our arms back and forth to ‘The British Grenadiers’. Zac sang along, and I loved that he knew every word. We were at the tail end, and when I finally glimpsed Milly and Peggy and James again, they were getting further and further ahead as we processed through the town.
I tugged at Zac’s arm, smiling. ‘Shall we catch them up?’
It was as if I had flicked a switch, turning him from happy to sad. ‘Don’t you want to be with me?’
‘Forever.’
‘The three of them are a family. It’s the two of us now.’ He smiled. ‘Or three. Yes?’ He put a hand on my tummy. ‘We’re making our own family. Aren’t we?’
‘Yes.’ I smiled up at him. When I broke his gaze, I realised that I had lost sight of my best friend and my surrogate parents. As far long as I could remember, I had walked with them, and until the last few years, with my grandmother too, claiming James’s arm during the Remembrance Sunday commemorations that St Ives did so beautifully.
‘Doesn’t that make you happy?’
‘Yes.’ I nodded to confirm it. ‘That’s a lovely thing. Yes.’ It was what I had always wanted. And I could see he was right about my not being a part of the family of three that was Peggy and James and Milly. But to be without them in that place, on that day, was like having a piece of myself cut away.
Now The Backwards House (#ulink_8b3250e7-5818-5e0b-8b57-2488b519910f)
Two years and five months later
Bath, Tuesday, 2 April 2019
The country lane that Maxine’s driver is speeding along is lined with golden daffodils. They flutter and dance and twinkle on their green banks in exactly the way Wordsworth said.
I have the sense that Maxine is watching me, though she is slumped against the cream-coloured leather car seat and seeming to look at her own lap, where her hands are resting. Her nails, as usual, are long and perfectly manicured. The polish is what my grandmother calls dragon-lady red, and matches Maxine’s lipstick. I have never seen a chip in that polish.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Not far.’ She answers like a parent. Or at least how I think parents answer, because my own have been dead for too long for me to know this from experience, and I am not a parent myself, however much I try to tell myself that she counted and I am.
The car enters a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Bath. Because the houses here are built on top of old quarries, they get alarming cracks from subsidence, so walls split and ceilings buckle, hurling dark-grey plaster dust and chunks of building into the rooms.
Maxine’s driver turns onto a street that is filled with police cars and vans, all clustered near a modern, brick, perfectly square end-of-terrace house. The house is surrounded by police tape. ‘Come on,’ Maxine says, and I follow her out of the car.
I stand a couple metres away as Maxine speaks to a tall man with dark hair and dark-rimmed glasses, wearing a dark suit and standing outside of the cordon. He looks like the prince of death as he peers at me. I decide he is more likely to be MI5 than police as he nods at Maxine and says, ‘Tess’s up there. She’s expecting you.’
Maxine moves her head to signal that we need to go into the tent that encloses the house’s front door. The door has an awning with a strange coating of artificial grass. We are given forensic suits, so that our hair is obscured by white hoods, our mouths and noses covered by white masks, and our shoes enveloped in white footwear protectors. I want to hesitate, but I don’t let myself. Maxine marches into the house, and I march after her.
‘Don’t touch or move anything,’ she tells me, without turning round.
The carpet inside the entryway is mink-grey and I can see the tracks left by the vacuum, despite the ghost-shapes of old spills that no amount of shampoo will remove. The air is scented with pine and lemon, and window cleaner, plus the lingering hint of something that makes my stomach clench because it reminds me of Zac’s soap.
‘The burglar alarm wasn’t tripped,’ Maxine says. ‘She either de-activated it to let someone in, or didn’t activate it in the first place. Good chance she knew them.’
‘She. Who is she?’
Maxine is making a performance of looking around too attentively to notice that I have spoken.
The house seems the wrong way round, with the sitting room at the back, spanning the building’s entire width. There are no books on the shelves of the fake wood bookcases, and no dust either. There is a single half-drunk cup of strong black tea on the cheap glass coffee table. Not many people drink their tea with no milk. I’ve known two, and though Milly likes hers weak, and Zac strong, it came as a surprise that she and Zac should share anything other than their mutual hatred.
The kitchen is to the left side of the entry hall. It is also pristinely clean, though far from luxurious with peeling laminate cupboards, a half-size fridge like my own, and cork flooring.
At the bottom of the stairs is a handbag, stiff and upright, the obvious item in any game of odd one out. Tan leather, shiny gold hardware, and the Hermès logo in its cleanly embossed capital letters. Only once before have I come across a designer bag of this ilk.
Maxine answers one of the many questions I haven’t voiced. ‘It was a two-month holiday let, paid by credit card. They haven’t traced the holder of the card, but it didn’t belong to the woman who was occupying the house. She moved in a week ago – used a false name.’
We crunch our way up the stairs, along a roll of white paper. I can see on either side of it that the stairs have been sanded and painted.
At the top of the landing, straight in front of us, is an open bedroom door. A tall woman in another moon suit, glasses peeping out of her otherwise-covered face, emerges and squeezes onto the landing with us. ‘Hey, Maxine,’ the woman says.
‘Hey, Tess.’ It isn’t the forensic drama that brings home the fact that I am being allowed to see another version of Maxine, who is not slouching. It is Maxine’s use of the word ‘Hey’ and its attendant chumminess.
‘Needless to say,’ says Tess, ‘don’t touch anything.’
‘Sure thing,’ Maxine says, in more of the new Maxine language.
Tess does not ask who I am when she motions for us to follow her. There is a frizz of grey hair on her temple, which has escaped the head covering. There are smile lines around her eyes, and my guess is that in the part of her life that doesn’t involve space suits and corpses, this woman is restrainedly contented, with wry good humour.
Instead of moving forward when Tess beckons, though, I freeze. My head is telling me to go in, but my body does not seem to want to.
I’d thought the sweat had dried on me in Maxine’s car after my run, but I am wet again, beneath my breasts, down my spine. The mask over my mouth is stopping me from breathing. My scalp is itchy and hot beneath the hood.
Maxine puts a hand on my shoulder. The last time she did that I practically chopped it off. She says, ‘You don’t know the strength of a person until they’ve been tested.’
I nearly say, No shit, Sherlock, which is one of Milly’s favourite expressions. Milly loves the word shit. Instead, I manage a more restrained, ‘Thanks for your wisdom,’ and for the first time in forever, Maxine visibly blanches.
Then The Forgotten Things (#ulink_5fb9ec71-17a1-50aa-8e2d-a4aa6c2e6598)
Two years and four months earlier
Cornwall, Mid-December 2016
Zac left for London early this morning for a British Cardiovascular Society symposium. Tomorrow he will fly to the Ukraine for a fleeting visit, to do some teaching in a hospital in Kiev. Before he drove away, I leaned into the open car window for a final kiss goodbye, my hair unbrushed and circles under my eyes after a night of endlessly being sick.
I watched the car disappear out of sight, fantasising that I would get out my journal and write. Instead, I wandered through the house nibbling a special ginger biscuit that was supposed to help with nausea but was proving useless. I was ten weeks pregnant but the sickness wasn’t getting any better.
Zac hated clutter, but this place was decorated in a romantic style that seemed to invite it. The personal things were all mine – the cardigan thrown over the cabbage roses sofa, the pregnancy magazines covering the distressed coffee table, the pot of lip gloss and ponytail holder on the white-painted chimney piece, the novels on the chintz armchair. Zac was constantly putting them away, then scrubbing the artificially aged surfaces with disinfectant wipes. I was trying to be more orderly, because it was painful to see him so unnerved by what he would call mess and I would call the ordinary chaos of human life.
Since Maxine’s ambush on the cliffs two months earlier, I’d stepped up my efforts to search the house for some sign of Jane. I poked my fingers into the toes of Zac’s socks when I tossed the clean pairs into the drawer. I ran my hand under the mattress when I made the bed. I examined the seams of his suits when I hung up his shirts from the dry cleaners. I checked his books as I dusted, to see if any were mere shells with cavities for hiding things. So far, I had found nothing. His taste in books, all hardbacks and dust-free, was unsurprising – medical ethics, law, artificial intelligence, and the surveillance state. He especially liked it when these subjects intersected. His current book at bedtime was about the use of technology by a group of anonymous hackers to promote political and social change.
As I closed the lid of a shoebox that lived in his wardrobe – it contained a pair of unworn black Oxfords – I had a flash of Zac loading a new carbon-fibre suitcase onto the passenger seat of his sports car. Everybody saved their old suitcases for packing stuff when they moved, didn’t they? Before I had finished this thought I was rushing down the stairs to the cupboard that runs beneath them.
My own suitcases were towards the front. I’d used them to transport my stuff from what I referred to as the brown house. My attic bedroom, with walls that I’d painted all the colours of the rainbow, was the one exception to the law of brown. The rest of the house was filled with brown carpets that my grandmother vacuumed every day, brown tapestry curtains that I was always opening and she was always closing, and brown sofas covered in bobbled brown blankets that I was always tearing off and she was always putting back. ‘I don’t want my fine furniture destroyed by the sun,’ my grandmother would say.
I actually felt a kind of nostalgic affection for the brown house as I started to drag my suitcases from the cupboard beneath Zac’s stairs, sliding and pulling them into the wide hallway behind me.
I couldn’t help but smile at my grandmother’s blue vinyl train case, which was like seeing an old friend. When I once expressed surprise at the pretty colour, she told me my grandfather bought it for her. ‘Horribly impractical. See how it scuffs,’ she said. But she looked at it with reluctant affection. After all, she’d brought it from their farm to my parents’ house when she moved in to look after me. I in turn brought it to Zac’s, stuffed with my bathroom things and make-up.
It wouldn’t occur to Zac that I’d enter this dank and dusty place, which he avoided, given the germs that must infest it. I had to crawl inside to reach the final suitcases. They were old, made of tan canvas and trimmed with tan fake leather in the corners. The larger of the two was too bulky and heavy to comply with today’s airline specifications.
I shone my phone torch over them. Flimsy padlocks linked the zippers. I lifted each of the identification tags. Zac had written his name on both. He’d probably dragged them around the continent during his gap year grand tour, and kept them out of nostalgic fondness.
I tugged Zac’s clunky things into the hall, then unfastened my grandmother’s train case. Tucked within a silky stretch pocket on its topside was a snap-closing coin purse filled with tiny keys for old suitcase locks. The purse – quilted fabric, and brown, of course – had lived in that pocket for as long as I could remember. I could hear my grandmother’s voice. Brown is a practical colour, Holly. It doesn’t show the dirt. Hurrah for brown. For once, I was glad of my grandmother’s fixed habits. In an instant, I spilled the keys onto the stripped floorboards with a clatter.
The good thing about suitcase keys, my grandmother used to say, was that so many of them worked in multiple locks – you just needed to gauge the size by eye. Perhaps my grandmother had a bit of spy in her, too. The third key I tried fitted perfectly into the lock on Zac’s larger case. There was a satisfying click and the shackle popped out.
I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find inside when I unzipped it, kneeling on the cold floor. Secret documents? Stacks of cash? Jane’s body? My expectations were unreasonably high, so my stomach fell when the lid of the case flopped onto the floor with a puff of dust and I saw that it was empty.
The same key worked on the lock of the medium-sized suitcase, too. ‘Oh,’ I said out loud. Because there was no way that the suitcase nested inside belonged to Zac.
Despite my grandmother-shaped aversion to brown, the hidden case was quite charming. The diagonal lines of four-petalled flowers and interlocking Ls and Vs processed in their determined order, stamped in muted gold on a brown background. One of my hands floated towards the monogrammed canvas and slid extra-lightly across the PVC coating, surprised by how smooth it was. But I quickly got down to the business of unbuckling the leather tag to check whether there was a name on it.
JM was hot-stamped on the surface. It had to stand for Jane Miller. Had to. To my delight, there was a piece of thick cream paper inside the tag, though there was no writing on the front. I took it out and flipped it. On the reverse, in Zac’s perfectly regular cursive, it read Jacinda Molinero. There was no address or telephone number or email. Just the name. Hardly of any use if the suitcase were to be lost.
My language skills had languished since that final MI5 interview. Practising them hurt like an imperfectly healed wound when you picked off the scab. But there was something about the word Molinero … I needed to remember what it meant.
I closed my eyes to try to think. What came to me was the illustrated deck of cards from when I first started to learn Spanish. The teacher thought the cards would help us with the words for different occupations. It was a kind of un-cosy version of Happy Families,where the dentists and plumbers and shopkeepers all looked tired and overworked. There was a particular card I was fumbling for, in whatever dark corner of my brain it was filed in.
I squeezed my eyes shut more tightly, and the picture began to form. An old lady scowling in her blue apron and white hat, letting flour fall from her fingers into a huge yellow sack. Behind her was a red-roofed wooden house with a windmill attached to it. Señora Molinero. That was what it said beneath her. Mrs Miller.
Molinero was Spanish for Miller. Jane Miller. Jacinda Molinero. The first names started with the same letter. Jacinda had to be Jane. Zac’s handwriting on the suitcase label seemed to confirm this.
If you come across any objects of Jane’s, tell us about them in as much detail as you can. That was what Maxine said to me on the bench by the cliffs. But it wasn’t Maxine I wanted this knowledge for. It was me. Me, myself and I, as my grandmother used to say, never clear as to whether she thought this emphasis on self was a good or bad thing. I grabbed my phone and typed in the name Jacinda Molinero, but the search engine returned only blanks.
Thankfully, if Jacinda Molinero’s uber-designer bag ever had a lock, it was missing. The brass zipper moved with satisfying smoothness, and I laid the two halves of the bag carefully on the floor. Each half was covered by a mesh divider, so I unzipped those too. There was nothing beneath them.
One of the dividers had a small zipped pocket built into it, so I undid this and slipped a hand inside. My fingers bumped against something stiff and square, and came up clutching a black card with silver lettering and a foil edge. Albert E. Mathieson, International Tax Law.
I tried another Internet search, this time for Albert E. Mathieson. There were pages of hits, including a link to his business website, multiple articles in professional tax journals, and blog posts that I could see were genuinely informative as well as extremely scary, because they seemed to suggest that it was very easy to be a criminal tax evader and not even know it. He specialised in high-net-worth clients who were in trouble with America’s Internal Revenue Service, and though his office was in Malibu he represented clients in more than fifty countries.
‘Going somewhere, Holly?’
I screamed, and fell backwards, sitting hard on the floorboards, my stomach plunging even faster than the rest of me.
‘Oh my God. I think I had a heart attack.’
‘Lucky I’m here then.’ Zac held out a hand. I reached for it and he pulled me up. He plucked something from my hair. ‘Cobweb.’ He brushed my cheek with a finger, frowned and wet it in his mouth, then tried again. ‘Dust smear.’ He took a miniature bottle of sanitising gel from a pocket and rubbed some on his hands.
‘Don’t ever sneak up on me like that again.’
‘I didn’t sneak, Holly. You were clearly absorbed.’ His voice, as usual, was ironic and light, but his face was pale, his dual-coloured eye extra bright against his skin.
‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’
He shook his head to deny this absurdity. ‘What are you doing?’
I tried to swallow as I thought, but it was difficult. I surprised myself by telling the truth, which was sometimes easier than a lie. ‘I – I wanted to know about you. See your things. See your history, who you were. Are.’
He laughed. ‘Clearly someone whose taste in suitcases has improved.’
‘Why are you here, Zac? You should be on your way to London.’
‘Why are you here, Holly? You should be on your way to the hospital.’ There was a tension in his lips, as if he was trying not to let them move. But there were still occasional twitches.
‘I called in sick. The morning sickness is so bad. I hardly slept last night.’
‘My poor Holly. I had to come back because I forgot my phone. I’ll still make it – my talk isn’t until late this afternoon.’ He smiled slowly. ‘So we’re both here when we should be somewhere else.’
One of my hands rose to his caress his head, which was damp. ‘Is it raining?’
‘No.’
My heart was still beating fast, but he was sweating. I was struck by how controlled he kept everything in the house, as if in contrast to a body he couldn’t perfectly regulate, though he mostly managed to. ‘Are you angry at me?’ I asked.
‘Why would I be?’ He pulled me into his arms.
‘For looking in your suitcases.’ My forehead was against his chest. He smelled soapy and clean and woody and lovely, when the smell of everything else for the past two months had made me want to be sick.
‘Were you telling me the truth about what you’re doing, Holly?’
I pulled away and looked up at him. He was studying me so intently. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, if you wanted to see my history, as you say, you could have asked. So I can’t help but wonder if you were dragging out those suitcases so you could pack them and run away.’
‘No. Of course not.’ I was shaking my head at the irony of my telling the truth but not being believed. ‘How could you think that?’
‘It’s happened before.’ I could feel him playing with my hair again. ‘Dead fly.’
I shuddered. ‘Have you got it?’
‘Yes.’ He walked quickly to the front door to flick it away, then applied more gel to his fingers. ‘This is your house too. You can go anywhere you wish. Touch anything you find. Open whatever cupboard or drawer you want. I’d never stop you.’
‘Really?’
He took a step away, still with a hand on each of my upper arms, as if needing to evaluate me from different vantage points to make his assessment. ‘Really. I have no secrets from you.’ He leaned over to lift something from the floor. The tax attorney’s card, which I must have dropped when Zac walked in. ‘So you found my good friend Al.’
I cleared my throat, feeling caught out again. ‘Yes. Who is he?’
‘American. We were at UCL together – he read international law. Obsessed with tax but an interesting, funny guy. As smart as they come.’ He glanced towards the beautiful suitcase. ‘Was Al’s card in that?’
‘Yes. Did you give the card to Jane?’
‘Could have been Al – he visited us in London once, several years ago. Might have been me – hard to remember. Anything else you want to know before I leave?’
‘Was the suitcase Jane’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘A gift from you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why do you still have it?’
‘I didn’t know I did. She didn’t leave anything behind when she went. Was her suitcase inside one of mine?’
I nodded, then confirmed it with a quiet, ‘That one,’ as I pointed to his medium-sized suitcase.
‘She must have stored it there, so it was a kind of stowaway when I moved here from London – I didn’t know she’d done that. Would you like it?’
‘Wouldn’t that be weird?’
‘Why would it be? It should be used.’
‘Why does the tag say “Jacinda Molinero”? Molinero’s Miller. Right?’
‘It was my nickname for her. Did you look up the Spanish on your phone?’
I nodded. I’d never told him about my ability to speak Spanish, probably because I never wanted him to know about my failed aspiration to be a spy, and my language skills were bound up with that.
‘Jane loved Spanish.’ He looked so fond, even proud, as he talked about her. ‘She seemed to be able to learn any language she wanted, as soon as she stepped into a new country. It’s a rare gift, but some people have it. She loved to travel.’ He had never spoken about her before. So normally. Using her name.
Maxine could fuck off. He wasn’t behaving like a man with anything to hide. Tears were running down my cheeks.
‘What is it? Holly? – You cry so easily these days.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t deserve you.’
‘Yes you do.’
‘I don’t. You should be with someone who’s accomplished – some clever doctor or barrister.’
‘They’re boring. And that would be predictable.’
‘A supermodel.’
This made him laugh. ‘Even more boring. And I’m already with the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You are to me.’
I pulled him closer, trying to shut out Maxine’s voice, which whispered out of my own bones that if I was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen it was only because I bore a likeness to Jane. He looked so pleased when I moved my hands down his back, when I kissed him, when I whispered that I wanted him so much and I couldn’t wait until he returned.
‘But will you always feel that way?’ He moved a hand up my thigh, under my dress, beneath my underwear. ‘Are you sure you’ll never change your mind?’
‘Yes.’ I was unfastening his belt. ‘I’m sure.’
Now The Woman in the Room (#ulink_d6487ddc-8edf-5160-9d12-b8bdc9e5ccbc)
Two years and four months later
Bath, Tuesday, 2 April 2019
At first, I try not to look at the woman who has drawn so many police officers and forensic scientists to this house. I try to look at everything but her. I focus on the room.
The carpet is pale beige. It is clean and soft and probably the last thing she walked on. There is little in the way of furniture. A small pine wardrobe, a television screen attached to the wall, and a four-poster bed of shiny fake wood. The white sheets are so tangled I cannot help but imagine the aftermath of recent sex. It makes me think of another room, and another tempest of a bed, in a faraway house that rests on top of a plague pit by the sea.
‘What do you see?’ The voice is Maxine’s and she is talking to me.
‘The bed doesn’t go.’
‘I mean the woman.’
What I had wanted to say was that the mess of the bed doesn’t go with everything else in the superhumanly clean and empty house. ‘Nobody could die that neatly, in such a messy bed,’ I say.
She is naked, as far as I can tell, though the quilt hides her middle, going from the top of her thighs to the upper edge of her breasts. She is delicate, and probably a few centimetres shorter than I am, though it is difficult to be sure with her lying as she is. Her arms are by her sides, resting above the quilt and curved like parentheses. Her legs are as straight as a ballerina’s, though her toes are not pointed. I wonder if she was arranged in this position before her body grew stiff and cold.
I can’t look at her face. I put my hand to the side of my right eye to stop myself. I am too afraid, and I do not care if Maxine and Tess know it.
‘Were you wanting to say,’ Tess asks, ‘that the messy bed is out of place in context with the rest of the address?’
‘Yes.’
‘Be back in two minutes.’ Tess hurries from the room.
I crouch by the side of the bed. I long to smooth her hair. But again, I am too frightened that if I do I will see her face. If I were alone, I would tell her how sorry I am that I failed her, that I didn’t do enough to help to find her in time.
Where have you been, I silently ask, for the last six years?
My hand curls around hers, an impulse to comfort somebody who is beyond help. Even through the thin blue gloves they made me wear, I can feel that her warmth is gone. She is the temperature of the pine wardrobe. I remember imagining how my baby would pink up, as I fantasised about her birth. What has happened here is the opposite of pinking up. The hand in mine has lost its softness, its human sponginess. There is no give any more. The give, the warmth, the pinking up, that is what makes us human. But this hand is a plastic doll’s.
Maxine crouches beside me. ‘You can’t touch her.’
As I release my grip, I notice the nails. They are well cared for, and though they protrude no more than a few millimetres beyond the tips of her fingers, they are painted pinky-nude. They are not broken – there is no obvious evidence that she fought or struggled.
I want Peggy. I want her to fold me in her arms and let me press myself into her plump softness the way I did as a child.
Tess comes back into the room.
‘Can I ask when this happened?’ I say.
‘The early hours of this morning.’
What I can see of her skin is like a waxwork, but there is a blue tint to the jaundiced-looking yellow.
‘Are those pressure marks on the face?’ Maxine asks. ‘Though they’re not very pronounced.’
The question prompts me to look. It is an accident, a reflex, my movements so quick and panicked that everything is blurred. Before I can tear my eyes away, I glimpse skilfully dyed blonde hair. And I see her face. Her nose and mouth, I think, had oozed blood. The skin around them is extra pale, and her tongue sticks out as if she had bitten it. Her cheeks are dotted with red pinpricks that I think must be some kind of bruising.
‘Could be from post-mortem postural changes,’ Tess says.
What is not pronounced to Tess and Maxine is very pronounced to me.
I have learned too much from Zac. I cannot stop what comes out. ‘It’s suffocation of some kind, isn’t it?’ My voice is quiet. I force my eyes upwards, stop them at her neck, quickly close them before turning my head towards her feet. ‘I can’t see any marks on her neck, so maybe smothering more than strangulation.’
‘And you know this how?’ Tess says.
‘I used to date a cardiologist.’ There is a twinge of fear at saying this, as if Zac were in the room, listening. Even now, I imagine how he would bristle at the word date, and especially at the words used to.
Dating is a word from women’s magazines filled with things that rot your brain. It’s the worst kind of cultural vulgarity.
We will never be in the past tense, Holly. You and I are forever. You don’t go through what we have, invest what we have, only to give up.
This is why I say date. This is why I say used to.
‘Explain what you see, please,’ Tess says.
So I try, in a strange blend of Maxine’s lack of inflection with Zac’s words. What I remember about his saying them to me was his charm, the way he smiled, as if he was telling a dark joke. And that I smiled back, and my face grew flushed, and there were shivers all the way down my arm as he traced a finger over my bare shoulder.
‘It’s the blue tint to her skin. What happens to the heart, and the skin, if someone dies from a cardiac arrest, it’s the same as what happens with suffocation or strangulation. The heart continues to pump blood around the body for at least a couple of beats, but that blood doesn’t have as much oxygen, so it’s less pink. That’s why her skin has the blue tinge – the blood beneath it is deoxygenated.’
Tess nods. ‘Correct. Plus, the eyes are bloodshot.’ I nearly ask how she can know this, but realise she must have prised them open to look before we got here.
Maxine says, ‘Can Helen see her right ankle, please, Tess? You’ll need to go round to the other side of the bed, Helen.’
The oval is there, on the outer side of the lower calf, though I’d already half-glimpsed it. A smoky purple circle the size of a two-pence coin, slightly above the ankle bone. A bruise like a black star sapphire, perfectly cut, and set against the blue-tinted skin.
I am staring at that oval. Maxine is staring at me. ‘I’m not expecting you’d recognise her face in the circumstances, but have you seen the mark before?’ she says.
I can taste bile. The last time I tasted that was when I woke in hospital after it happened.
‘No,’ I say.
‘You’re sure?’ she says. ‘It doesn’t remind you of anything?’
Three years ago, looking at the photo in Zac’s bedside table, I’d wondered if it was a tattoo.
‘It’s a birthmark,’ I say. ‘A dark circle, that’s all.’
‘I’d say it’s very distinctive,’ Maxine says. ‘Would you say that too, Tess?’
‘I would.’
‘Then I will defer to your expertise. Am I free to go?’ My breathing is getting faster. My back is soaked, just as it was during the night sweats after her birth.
‘We’ve come across a photograph,’ Maxine says. ‘On the hard drive of a laptop that someone took a great deal of trouble to copy for us.’
I know who that someone is. That someone is me, and though I’ve never been told exactly what was on the drive, I have guessed.
‘There were indecent images and video footage on that drive – I can assure you it has all been carefully protected.’
I look at my feet. My eyes are welling up but I am determined not to cry.
‘One of the relatively innocuous images is of a woman lounging by a pool. Her birthmark is identical to this one.’
I take a few small steps, unhurriedly, towards the door. ‘I asked if I am free to go.’ I am practically choking.
‘Of course,’ Maxine says.
I am out of the room. I am on the landing. I am halfway down the paper-covered stairs.
Maxine is right behind me. ‘Tell me the specifics of anything you’ve done to give yourself away.’ Her voice is quiet. ‘Contact with anybody from your old life. Any crumb of evidence that could lead Zac to finding you here. Please.’
The image of my grandmother in the newspaper photograph, and the caption with her full name, flashes before me. Maxine’s face is expressionless as I tell her. But I leave out the sound of Peggy’s voice last night, and James’s, both of them flailing in the dark.
There is something else I leave out, too, because it belongs entirely to me, and I genuinely don’t think it is why this has happened. It has been over two years since Milly or I reviewed anything on our blog, but it still exists in hyperspace. A straggle of readers occasionally look at it, and every once in a while, a new comment appears.
Last summer, there was a response to a five-star review of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that I’d written several years earlier. Somebody with the username Abandoned Friend had this to say.
Your review sucks. You don’t address how selfish the heroine is. Whatever her husband did to her, she doesn’t stop to think about the worry and grief she caused the people she left behind. What about her poor aunt, who loved her? She should have found a way to let her know she was okay.
I didn’t know for sure that Abandoned Friend was Milly. But it seemed pretty likely that she was, and that she was talking about Peggy when she mentioned the poor aunt. So I created a new User Name, Brontë Fan, and replied to the comment.
I don’t think you are being fair. If she’d let her aunt know, that would have increased the risk of being discovered, and might also have put her aunt in danger. She knew her aunt was wise and would understand, and hoped the day would come when they could be reunited.
As soon as I posted the message, I felt sick, knowing I shouldn’t have done it.
I haven’t revisited the blog since then, fearing that even the act of opening the page would set off an alert somewhere.
‘Holly.’ The way Maxine says my name, my real name, out of anyone’s hearing, is almost human. For nearly two years, my grandmother has been the only one to call me that.
Despite this, my next words come like an explosion. ‘Why don’t they just arrest him? You know he’s done this.’
‘They need evidence first – that’s what’s happening here right now.’
‘Why didn’t they arrest him two years ago, once you had the hard drive? She wouldn’t be dead if you had.’
‘The data wasn’t as strong as we’d hoped, back then – it wasn’t conclusive. As far as the body in that room—’
‘Not “the body”. Jane. A human being called Jane.’
‘As far as Jane is concerned, we can’t go around making arrests for cases that the Crown Prosecution Service would toss in the bin. We need to get this right, so it will stick.’
I press my fists against my eyes. ‘He’s here. A woman came to the hospital. I think she must be his wife. With a little girl who must be his. Is she? Is she his daughter?’
‘Yes. His wife and his child. You’ve nothing to fear from them.’
‘The child is the same age …’ My voice trails off.
‘I know that must be difficult for you.’
‘Does the woman know who I am?’
‘We think probably not. The little girl’s medical condition is real. She needed that clinic appointment.’
‘Are they safe? He shouldn’t be allowed near a child.’
‘There’s no evidence he would hurt a child.’ She is uncharacteristically thoughtful, even hesitant, before she continues. ‘I’d hoped you could put all of this behind you. I wish that could have been true.’
Then A Quarrel (#ulink_05745728-30c4-57d3-9043-077701cd79ee)
Two years and three months earlier
Cornwall, 3 January 2017
Since finding Jane’s suitcase two weeks ago, I’d barely thought of anything else. On the third day of January, though, I was thinking about Milly instead. I was on my way to see her, and we were meeting by the harbour.
The sea was boiling. The wind was howling. The waves were moving walls of rock. Milly and I would never take the safer, drier lanes through the town. Like teenagers, we stuck to the path that followed the sea wall. Spray shot out and up, chasing us. We knew we really could be snatched and swallowed. It had happened to others before.
We threw our arms around each other, grabbed hands and ran through a gauntlet of water, screaming and laughing our calls of Happy New Year, refusing to worry about slipping, stopping to buy chips at one of the cafes along the harbour. There was a belated rendition of Happy Birthday, sung by Milly to me.
We turned on to the eighteenth-century pier, passing walls of stacked lobster pots, jumbo bags of green rope, and red plastic crates for hauling the dead mackerel from the boats to the land. The smell made me gag, but Milly didn’t notice and we walked on to the pier’s far end, where the air was clear.
Our feet were soaked, our hair was drenched, and we were shivering. But we were happy, sitting on the stone bench that followed the wall of the pier and doubled as our backrest. We were burning our fingers on the chips.
I scrambled to my feet, standing on the bench to look over the wall, so I could watch the lighthouse winking in the distance. Milly did the same.
‘I’ve missed you,’ she said.
I pictured the two of us, dancing together in a nightclub upcountry to celebrate my sixteenth birthday, our arms around each other, tinsel in our hair and swaying in heels too high to walk in, the room and lights spinning from too many bottles of beer, elated that we had pulled it off despite being underage.
‘Me too you,’ I said.
‘My mother says you have a father complex, because of your dad dying and all. She says that’s what you see in Zac.’
‘Eew. That’s not true.’ Though a part of me knew it was. Still, I blushed at the idea of Peggy thinking that.
‘We’re neglecting the blog,’ Milly said. ‘We’ll lose followers.’
‘I’ll do something this week. Wuthering Heights has been getting a lot of hate.’
‘Mum will be happy. She’s our number one fan. But have I told you lately she is completely insane? We crossed on the stairs, and she closed her eyes and chanted “Avert” and waved her hands about. Honestly, it was the most embarrassing thing.’
‘Did she pick that up when we made her read The Earthsea Quartet?’
‘Yep, but she won’t admit she’s trying to ward off curses or bad luck. She’d die before she confessed to any superstition about stair crossing.’
‘Have I told you lately that I am an orphan, and you are lucky to have a mum?’
‘Well you have Lord Voldemort. I can’t believe he let you out. Does he make you sleep in a dungeon?’
‘Yes – but don’t call him that, Milly.’
‘I’ll see your Lord Voldemort and raise you a Gaston.’
‘Fair enough. I deserved that.’
‘Looks like Lord Voldemort. Acts like Lord Voldemort. He’s even got the bald thing going on. Please tell me he hasn’t branded you with the dark mark.’
‘Only between my legs.’
She snorted a mouthful of the beer she’d brought out from the pub, the last place in the row of shops and restaurants along the front, and the closest one to the pier. I was drinking spiced tomato juice, and Milly thought this was because I was driving, which was true but not the most important reason.
‘You’re still in there after all,’ she said. ‘I was beginning to think he’d replaced you with a Stepford wife. Thank God the two of you aren’t married.’
‘He wants to.’
‘Well don’t. Please, promise me you won’t.’
My own secret voice was saying, You’re betraying him to sit and listen to this. You should say, How dare you talk about him that way. You should go home right now.
‘You’ll never escape him if you do,’ she said.
‘I don’t want to escape him.’ I thought of my baby, and how desperately I wanted him – or her – to be raised by two parents. To have what I didn’t.
‘Has he taken control of your bank accounts yet?’
‘No! I wouldn’t let him. But he wouldn’t try.’ As if to protect my baby from what we were saying, my hand started to float towards my tummy, though there wasn’t much of a bump yet. I had wanted to tell Milly about the baby several weeks ago, but Zac persuaded me that nobody should share such news until after the magic three-month mark, when the chance of miscarriage was dramatically reduced. The start of January meant I had reached that mark.
Milly looked genuinely surprised. ‘No joint accounts?’
‘No.’
‘Strange. That’s not what I’d have predicted. He’s not tried to get his name on the deed to your house?’
I was lucky, in that I had the house my parents left me, plus some money from my father’s pension. But I was still careful to live off my salary.
‘Of course not. He’s generous – too generous – but he likes to keep his things and mine legally separate. It’s a big thing with him, and it’s important to me too, because of my grandmother.’
My grandmother had savings from the sale of the family farm many years ago, and I was using them to fund her care. But the money was being eaten away fast, and it wouldn’t be long before I had to take over the cost.
Milly shook her head. Her blonde hair gleamed in the moonlight, then dimmed as a heavy cloud moved in front of the full fat moon again to eclipse it. ‘Okay. I have to admit that that stumps me.’
‘Why do you hate him so much, Milly?’
‘He hates me.’
‘He doesn’t.’ We were back in total darkness, feeling the mist from the sea but unable to see it. ‘He wants to get to know you.’
‘No he doesn’t. Question. Did you tell him we were meeting tonight?’
‘He’s on nights tonight.’
‘I know that, Holly – I saw him going in as I was coming out. That’s not an answer. You could have told him yesterday or this morning. Does he know?’
‘No.’
‘I knew it. That’s why we’re here. If you’d told him, he’d have got in the way. You know it too. You’re just not admitting it to yourself. He’s found ten different ways to stop us spending time together over the last few weeks.’
We turned away from the wall, facing the harbour once more. ‘It was the time of year, Milly.’ I sat down again. ‘You said so yourself.’
‘I was trying to make it easy for you.’ She sat too. ‘Do you ever make calls without his being there?’
‘All the time.’ But I realised this wasn’t true. Somehow Zac was invariably nearby when I used my phone.
Milly went on. ‘He may not be controlling your money yet, but you will get sick of him, and when you try to leave he won’t make it easy. Mum and I are frightened. He’s cutting you off from us.’
I tried to lighten things. ‘Isn’t this a bit dramatic? I want to make a family with him. I want to make what you grew up in.’
‘And he fucking well knows it. He’s playing you. He’s saying what you want to hear.’
‘He’s loving. He cares for me.’ I threw up my hands, invisible in the darkness. ‘I matter to him.’
‘Of course you do. More than anything in the world. I’ve heard him say it and that’s what scares me. He chose you because he thinks you have no one. He thinks you’re all alone. But he’s wrong. You have us.’
Although I never felt the cold since becoming pregnant, I shivered. ‘I know that.’
‘Well don’t ever forget it.’ The light slowly returned as the cloud moved sideways to reveal the moon. Milly pulled away to study me. ‘At least you’re starting to look more like you again. Your face isn’t so thin and pale. And I love what you’re wearing.’
‘Chosen for you.’ I loved what I was wearing too. Green ankle boots, bobbled red wool tights, a short mustard tube skirt, and a fleecy orange jumper to disguise my thickening waist. I unzipped my coat and flashed the full view at Milly.
‘And Rainbow Girl is back!’ she said. ‘Goodbye, Grey Woman. Hello there, Rainbow Girl. We’ve missed you. I much prefer you in clothes I need to wear sunglasses to look at.’
‘Hello.’ I zipped up again.
‘Oh, don’t put it away. I want a pic to show Mum.’ Milly’s teeth were chattering.
‘You won’t get a pic out here. Not with the light changing every five seconds.’ The moon was flashing at us, off, on, off, on, as a procession of clouds sped past to eclipse and uncover her. She seemed to mirror the lighthouse’s lamp. For an instant, I glimpsed a frown that Milly didn’t imagine I could see. ‘How’s Gaston?’ I said.
‘I hate him so much,’ Milly said, ‘that I want him to die, because then I would get over him. But I can’t stop fucking him.’
It was my turn to snort my drink.
Milly went on. ‘I hate how he puts that fucking gross hairspray on that fucking gross long hair of his, and I wish it would catch fire when he fills that fucking gross old wreck of a car of his with petrol.’ She paused. ‘Look how – odd – you look.’
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Claire Kendal
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Шпионские детективы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: I Spy, электронная книга автора Claire Kendal на английском языке, в жанре шпионские детективы