“Enough to cover three steps?”
Nish scratched her chin. “You’re going to have to give me a bit more to go on.”
Murray didn’t mention the suicides at first. He recounted the report that Anna and Mark had made and how Anna had been convinced the rabbit hadn’t been placed there by an animal.
“I’d say she could be right.”
Murray leaned forward in anticipation, and Nish held up a warning finger. “This is totally off the record and entirely hypothetical, understood? Without photos, and without examining the scene, it’s impossible for me to make a professional judgment.”
“But?”
Nish laughed. “Blood—in the quantity we’re talking about—doesn’t pour out of a prone rabbit. It seeps. And it coagulates. So, although a hundred and fifty mill tipped on the floor would make a hell of a mess—ever dropped a glass of wine?—the same amount oozing from a rabbit would congeal long before it dripped onto the step below. Most of it would be caught in the fur.”
“Right. So someone deliberately tipped blood on the other steps to make a more impressive crime scene?”
“Sounds like it. The bigger question is, why?” Nish eyed Murray, her head tilted slightly to one side. “There’s more to this than you’re telling me, isn’t there.”
It wasn’t a question.
“There were two suicides at Beachy Head last year. Tom and Caroline Johnson—they owned the car showroom on the corner of Main Street.”
Nish snapped her fingers. “Left a black Audi in the car park, right? Rocks in his rucksack.”
“You’re good. That was Tom Johnson. His wife, Caroline, died seven months later—exactly a year ago. Same place, identical method. Anna Johnson is their daughter.” He passed Nish a plastic evidence bag containing the anonymous anniversary card, together with a photograph of the pieced-together card.
“Suicide?” Nish read aloud. “Think again.” She looked up. “Very dramatic. The suggestion being that she was murdered?”
“That’s certainly how Anna Johnson interpreted it. This morning she opened the door to find the rabbit smeared across their top step.”
“Beats dog shit through the letterbox.”
“What do you think?”
“Other than the fact that it’s a waste of a nice rabbit pie? I think it’s fishy. What do CID say?”
“Not a lot.”
Nish had known Murray a long time. “Oh, Murray . . .”
“I’m doing the background work, that’s all. You know what CID are like nowadays. Stretched to buggery. I’ll package it up for the DI as soon as there’s something concrete to go on. Fingerprints, for example.” He gave Nish a winning smile and pushed the exhibit bag closer to her.
Nish pushed it back. “Not without a budget code, I’m afraid.”
“Couldn’t you put it through on the original job?”
“You know I’m not supposed to do that.”
“She lost both her parents, Nish. She’s a new mother, desperately trying to hold it all together without mum there to give her moral support.”
“You’re going soft in your old age.”
“Whereas you’re still hard as nails, of course. What was it you were saying about kittens?” He pushed the evidence bag back across the table.
This time, she took it.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
The rocking chair was a wedding present from my parents. It has a high back and smooth curved arms exactly the right height for sleepy nighttime feeds. It arrived with a red ribbon, two soft cushions, and a note that said, For the nursery.
I spent hours in this chair. You never got up—men didn’t, in those days—and I was afraid to turn on the light in case it kept Anna awake, so I rocked back and forth in the dark, willing her to sleep.
When Anna moved out of the nursery I brought the rocking chair downstairs, where it divided its time between the kitchen and the sitting room. But now it is back here, in Anna’s nursery.
In our granddaughter’s nursery.
The room is large. Extravagant for a baby, especially one currently sleeping in her parents’ bedroom, judging by the Moses basket on Anna’s side of the bed. Above the white crib is a string of pink and white bunting, with the name Ella picked out in pale green.
Adjacent to the crib is a chest of drawers and, on the opposite wall, a matching wardrobe and a changing table with gingham-lined baskets filled with diapers and talcum powder.
I mean only to peek inside—I think it’s unlikely I’ll find the key here—but my feet find their way across the soft gray carpet to the rocking chair. My rocking chair.
Back and forth, back and forth. The light low. The view across the rooftops the same as it’s been for twenty-six years. Anna in my arms.
They called it the baby blues then. It felt more than that. I was overwhelmed. Frightened. I wanted to call Alicia—the only one of my friends who might have understood—but I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone. I had everything she didn’t: a husband, a big house, money. What right did I have to cry?
I’ve stayed here too long. I need to get on. I need to get out.
Downstairs I check the kitchen, automatically straightening the tea towel hanging on the Aga stove. There’s a pile of magazines on the table, and a scattering of post dumped in the empty fruit bowl on the island. I don’t find the key I’m looking for.
There’s a scuffle of paws from the utility room.
Rita.
My breath catches in my throat and although I don’t make a sound, I hear her whine. She can sense I’m here.
I pause, my fingers resting lightly on the door handle. Surely being seen by a dog isn’t the same as being seen by humans? Rita whines again. She knows I’m here—walking away would be cruel.
A quick hello and then I’ll leave. Where’s the harm in that? She can’t tell anyone she’s seen a ghost.
The door is open barely an inch when it’s forced open by a barrel of fur moving so fast it tumbles over itself and twice rolls along the tiled floor before standing again.
Rita!
She jumps backward, her hackles up and her tail wagging as though she doesn’t know how she should be feeling. She barks once. Twice. Jumps forward and then back. I remember her growling at shadows in the hedgerows on our evening walks, and I wonder what she saw then that I dismissed as nothing.
I drop to my knees and hold out a hand. She knows my smell, but my appearance is confusing her.
“Good girl, Rita.”
The sob in my voice catches me unawares. Rita’s ears prick up in recognition, and the ridge of bristling fur along her spine subsides. Her tail is a blur, taking her back end with it. Another whine.
“Yes, it’s me, Rita. There’s a good girl. Come on.”
She needs no further invitation. Satisfied that, contrary to first impressions, her mistress is indeed in her kitchen, she throws herself at me, licking furiously at my face and leaning so heavily against me I have to put out a hand to steady myself.
I sit with her, my quest forgotten as I bury my face in her fur. I feel the advent of tears and I swallow hard and refuse to let them fall. When Rita arrived from Cyprus she’d been in a rescue center for eight months. She was affectionate and gentle but had such acute separation anxiety that even leaving the room was an ordeal. The first time we went out she howled so loudly we could still hear her at the end of the street, and I had to turn back and leave you to go on alone.
Gradually Rita realized she was here for keeps. That if we went out we’d be back with treats for being such a brave girl. She still greeted us on our return with excitement bordering on relief, but the howling ceased, and she settled into a calm and happy dog.
Guilt seeps through me as I imagine how she must have felt the day I didn’t come home. Did she wait by the front door? Run the leng
th of the hall and back, whining to see me? Did Anna stroke her? Reassure her I’d be back soon? All the while wondering herself what had happened. Worrying as much as Rita. More.
Rita suddenly sits up, nose in the air and ears alert. I freeze. She’s heard something. Sure enough, a second later, I hear it, too. The crunch of gravel. Voices.
A key in the lock.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
ANNA
Mark insists on coming with us into the house, instead of dropping us at the curb.
“So you are worried?” I say as he carries Ella’s car seat indoors. “Now that you know it wasn’t a fox that left that rabbit.” There’s a chill in the hall, and I turn up the thermostat until I hear the heating kick in.
“He actually said they couldn’t be certain either way.”
“Without photos, you mean?”
“Without forensics.” He gives me a look and I bite back a further retort. Bickering won’t help. “But yes, I’m worried,” he says, and his tone is serious. I feel childishly vindicated, but Mark isn’t done. “I’m worried about you.” He shuts the front door. “What you said at the police station . . . about feeling your mother’s presence . . .” He doesn’t finish, and I don’t help him out. “It’s a perfectly normal part of the grieving process, but it could be a sign you’re not coping. And then there’s Ella, and all the hormones involved in becoming a mother . . .”
I wait for several beats. “You think I’m going mad.”
“No. I don’t think that.”
“What if I like feeling as though Mum’s still here?”
Mark nods thoughtfully and rubs a forefinger across his lips, his thumb beneath his chin. His listening face. It makes me feel like a patient, not a partner. A case, not the mother of his child.
“What if I want to see ghosts? Sorry—what if I want to have post-bereavement hallucinatory experiences?” The correction is sarcastic, and I see hurt in Mark’s eyes, but I’m past the point where I can calm myself down.
“I’ll see you later.” He doesn’t kiss me good-bye and I don’t blame him. He shuts the door and I hear the jangle of his keys as he double-locks it behind him. I wonder fleetingly if he thinks he’s keeping the danger out or shutting it in.
“Your mother is an idiot, Ella,” I tell her. She blinks at me. Why did I have to be so unpleasant? Mark’s worried, that’s all. Personally and professionally. Wasn’t it precisely his compassion that attracted me to him? Now I’m seeing that same trait as a flaw.
I shiver. Bend down to feel the radiator. It’s warming up but it’s still so cold in here. I laugh out loud—all the ghostly clichés are coming out now—but it’s unconvincing, even to me, because it isn’t just the temperature that makes me feel as though someone else is in the room.
It’s my mother’s perfume.
Addict, by Dior. Vanilla and jasmine. So faint I think I’m imagining it. I am imagining it. Because even as I stand at the foot of the stairs, my eyes closed, I realize that I can’t smell it at all.
“Come on, you.” I unbuckle Ella from the car seat. Talking aloud to her quells the churning feeling in my stomach, as though a thousand butterflies were caught in a net.
Despite the Aga, the kitchen is icy, too. There’s a smell of fresh, cold air; a drift of jasmine I make myself ignore. Rita whines from the utility room. I open the door and go to fuss her, but she ignores me and runs into the kitchen, where she chases her nose in circles along the floor. Around and around she runs, and it makes me smile in spite of myself.
“Silly dog!” I say to Ella. “Isn’t she a silly dog?”
I find a piece of marrowbone, and reluctantly Rita leaves her imaginary rabbit chase and takes it to her bed by the Aga, where she gnaws contentedly.
Post-bereavement hallucinatory experiences. Such a clinical way to describe something so magical. So inexplicable.
“Some people claim to have had entire conversations with their loved ones,” Mark said at the police station. “It’s often part of a disordered grieving process known as pathological grief, but occasionally it can be a symptom of something more serious.”
Symptoms. Processes. Conditions.
Names for things we don’t understand, because we’re frightened of what they might mean. What they might do to us.
Entire conversations . . .
I’d give anything to hear my parents’ voices again. I have a few videos: birthday speeches; summer holiday antics; a film from my graduation, snippets recorded throughout the day, then stitched together. My parents are on the wrong side of the camera—they kept it proudly trained on me—but the microphone picked up every whispered word as they sat in their front-row seats in the Butterworth Hall at Warwick Arts Centre.
“Our little girl . . .”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Look at that one in the jeans—you’d think he’d have put a proper pair of trousers on.”
“You can talk—you look like you’ve been gardening in those.”
“How stupid of me—I thought today was about Anna! If I’d known it was a fashion parade for parents . . .”
They took me for lunch at Tailors, where Dad became prouder—and louder—with each course, and Mum wiped tears away as she shared my mediocre degree result with a stranger. By dessert I was desperate to leave, but I couldn’t steal this moment from them. I was their only child. The first Johnson to go to university. They deserved a celebration.
I’ve played the films so often I know every word by heart, but it isn’t the same. It could never be the same.
I close my eyes. Tip up my head. On impulse, I hold out my arms, palms uppermost, thinking how if anyone looks in the window right now, I will never live this down. But if I can feel Mum, if I can smell her perfume . . .
“Mum? Dad?” My voice sounds small and tinny in the empty kitchen. “If you can hear me . . .”
There’s a whistle of wind outside, a rustle from the trees in the garden. Rita whines, a faint, high-pitched cry that fades into nothing.
When I was eleven Laura showed me how to make a Ouija board, explaining how we could summon the dead with nothing more than some strategically lit candles and a board on which we had carefully marked the letters of the alphabet. She swore me to secrecy, and we waited until the next time Laura babysat to set everything up.
Laura turned the lights low. She took a CD from her bag and played a track I didn’t recognize, by an old-fashioned singer I’d never heard of.
“Ready?”
Our forefingers on the small piece of wood in the center of the board, we waited. And waited. I stifled the giggles. Laura’s eyes were closed, her face screwed up in concentration. I was getting bored. I’d expected a fun night in with Laura, scaring each other with ghost stories, the way my friends and I did at sleepovers.
I pushed the marker.
Laura’s eyes snapped open. I mirrored her look of shock.
“Did you feel that?”
I nodded furiously. She narrowed her eyes at me.
“Did you move it? Swear you didn’t move it.”
“I swear.”
Laura closed her eyes again. “Is there someone there?”
Gently, I pushed the marker across the board. Yes.
And then I wished I hadn’t. Because Laura’s face crumpled like paper, and tears pushed their way from beneath her eyelids and clung to her lashes.
“Mum?”
I wanted to cry, too. I couldn’t tell Laura I’d been messing around, but I couldn’t carry on with a game she wasn’t playing. Her fingers trembled, but the marker didn’t move. It was an age before she took away her hands.
“Shall we play something else instead?”
“Are you okay?” I was tentative, but Laura had already blinked away the beginnings of tears. She blew out the candles, whisked me into a game of M
onopoly.
Years later I confessed. We were sharing a bottle of wine, and I had a sudden memory of crouching over our homemade Ouija board, a sudden need to clear my conscience.
“I know,” she said, when I’d unburdened my soul.
“You know?”
“Well, I guessed. You were a crap liar when you were eleven.” She grinned and aimed a punch at my shoulder, then took in my face. “Don’t tell me it’s been eating you up all this time?”
It hadn’t, but I was relieved to discover it hadn’t been weighing on her mind, either.
My skin prickles; the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, one by one. I catch a trace of jasmine in my nostrils.
And then . . .
Nothing.
I open my eyes and drop my arms to my sides, because this is absurd. Ridiculous. My parents are dead, and I can no more summon them from my kitchen than I can spread wings and fly.
There are no messages. No hauntings. No afterlife.
Mark’s right. It’s all in my head.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
MURRAY
“I take it the husband doesn’t believe in ghosts,” Sarah said. They were sitting on the black leather sofa of Highfield’s family room, where Murray had joined Sarah for the forty-five minutes permitted for his evening meal break.
“Partner. No, he says they’re post-bereavement hallucinatory experiences.”
“Casper will be devastated.”
The door to the family room opened and a young girl came in. She was so thin her head seemed disproportionately large, and a crisscross of fine scars covered her arms from wrist to shoulder. She didn’t acknowledge Murray or Sarah, just picked up a magazine from the coffee table and took it out of the room.
“According to Mark Hemmings, up to sixty percent of bereaved people report seeing or hearing a loved one after death, or sense their presence in some other way.”
“So, what’s the difference between that and a ghost?” Sarah was flicking through the pages of Caroline Johnson’s appointment book. They ate early at Highfield, like kids fed their tea at five o’clock, and so Sarah had sat cross-legged on the sofa and looked through the case papers while Murray ate his sandwiches.