I change the subject. “How was your course?”
“Lots of role-play.” I hear him grimace. He hates that sort of thing.
“You’re later than I thought you’d be.”
“I dropped by the flat. I don’t like leaving it empty.”
When Mark and I met he was living in Putney. He saw clients in a room of his seventh-floor apartment and spent one day each week at a practice in Brighton—the same practice that distributed flyers around Eastbourne at the very moment I most needed it.
I told Laura about the pregnancy test before I broke the news to Mark.
“What am I going to do?”
“Have a baby, I guess.” Laura grinned. “Isn’t that how it usually works?”
We were sitting in a café in Brighton, opposite the nail bar where Laura used to work. She’d found a new job taking customer calls for an online shopping company, but I saw her looking at the girls laughing in the nail bar and wondered if she was missing the banter.
“I can’t have a baby.” It didn’t feel real. I didn’t feel pregnant. No nausea, no sore breasts . . . If it wasn’t for the half dozen tests I’d done, and the absence of a period, I’d have sworn it was all a bad dream.
“There are other options.” Laura spoke softly, even though there was no one else within earshot.
I shook my head. Two lives lost were already too many.
“Well, then.” She held up her coffee mug in a mock toast. “Congratulations, Mummy.”
I told Mark over dinner that night. I waited till the tables around us were full, protected by the company of strangers.
“I’m sorry,” I said when I’d dropped my bombshell. There was a flicker of confusion on his face.
“Sorry? This is amazing! I mean . . . isn’t it?” He scrutinized me. “You don’t think so?” He tried to be serious, but a slow grin was spreading across his face, and he looked around the restaurant as though expecting a round of applause from our oblivious dining companions.
“I . . . I wasn’t sure.” But I put my hand on my still-flat stomach and thought that after the awfulness of the previous year, here was something good. Something miraculous.
“Okay, so it’s maybe a little faster than we might have wanted—”
“Just a bit.” I could count the weeks we had been together on my fingers.
“—but it is what we wanted.” He looked for agreement and I nodded vehemently. It was. We’d even talked about it, surprising ourselves with our candor. Mark was thirty-nine when we met, bruised from a long-term relationship he’d thought was permanent, and resigned to the possibility that he might never have the family he wanted. I was only twenty-five, but painfully aware of how short life was. My parents’ deaths had brought us together; this baby would provide the glue to keep us there.
Gradually Mark wound down his London-based business and scaled up his Brighton one, moving in with me and renting out the Putney flat. It seemed the perfect solution. The rent covered his mortgage, plus a little extra, and the tenants seemed happy to fix anything that went wrong. Or so we’d thought, until a call from environmental health informed us the upstairs neighbor had complained about a smell. By the time we got there the tenants had left with their deposit and a month’s rent owing, leaving the place trashed too badly to rent out straightaway. Mark was gradually putting things back together.
“How’s it looking?”
“Grim. I’ve lined up someone to decorate but they’re on another job till mid-January, so it’ll be February before there’s a chance of a deposit from new tenants.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does.”
We fall silent, neither looking for an argument. We don’t need the rental income. Not now. We’re not short of a bob or two, as Granddad Johnson would have said.
I’d hand back every penny if it meant one more day with my parents, but the bottom line is: their deaths left me solvent. Thanks to Granddad Johnson, the house has never been mortgaged, and a combination of Dad’s savings and my parents’ life insurance policies means that sitting in my bank account right now is a fraction over one million pounds.
“I’ll sell the flat.”
“Why? This is bad luck, that’s all. Switch agencies—find one that checks out references better.”
“Maybe we should sell both places.”
For a second I don’t register what he’s suggesting. Sell Oak View?
“It’s a big house, and the garden’s a lot to maintain, when neither of us knows what we’re doing.”
“We’ll get a gardener.”
“The Sycamore went on the market for eight fifty, and it’s only four bedrooms.”
He’s serious. “I don’t want to move, Mark.”
“We could buy somewhere together. Something that belongs to us both.”
“Oak View does belong to us both.”
Mark doesn’t answer, but I know he doesn’t agree. He moved in properly at the end of June, when I was four months pregnant and Mark hadn’t spent a night at his flat in weeks.
“Make yourself at home,” I said cheerily, but the very fact that I’d said it reinforced my ownership. It was days before he stopped asking if he could make a cup of tea; weeks before he stopped sitting bolt upright on the sofa, like a visitor.
I wish he loved the house the way I do. With the exception of my three years at uni, I have only ever lived here. All of my life is within these four walls.
“Just think about it.”
I know he thinks there are too many ghosts here. That sleeping in my parents’ old bedroom is hard for me. Perhaps it’s hard for him, too. “Maybe.”
But I mean no. I don’t want to move. Oak View is all I have left of my parents.
* * *
• • •
Ella wakes at six on the dot. Six A.M. used to be early, but when you’ve been through weeks of night wakings and resigned yourself to starting your day at five, six A.M. feels like a lie-in. Mark makes tea and I bring Ella into bed with us, and we have an hour as a family before Mark has his shower and Ella and I go down for breakfast.
Half an hour later Mark’s still in the bathroom—I hear the clanging of the pipes and the rhythmic knocking that provide the musical accompaniment to our en suite shower. Ella is dressed, but I’m still in my pajamas, dancing around the kitchen to make her laugh.
The crunch of gravel outside makes me think of yesterday evening. As the morning light creeps into the kitchen, I’m embarrassed by the way I worked myself into a state. I’m relieved Robert’s phone was switched off, making Mark the only witness to my paranoia. Next time I’m alone at night I’ll play loud music, turn on lights, walk through the house slamming doors. I won’t cower in one room, creating a drama that doesn’t need to exist.
I hear the metallic snap of the letterbox, the soft thud of letters dropping onto the mat beneath, and then the lightest of finger taps that tells me the postman has left something in the porch.
When Ella was five weeks old and full of colic, the postman delivered a textbook Mark had ordered. It had taken me a full hour to settle her and she had finally dropped off to sleep when the postman banged the door knocker with such force the light fixtures rattled. I wrenched open the door in a sleep-deprived, postnatal rage, giving the poor man both barrels, and then some. Afterward, when my fury had burned itself out and my cries no longer rivaled Ella’s, the postman suggested he might simply leave further packages outside the door, with no danger of disturbing us. It appeared mine was not the only house on his round at which this was the preferred modus operandi.
I wait until his footsteps leave our drive, not wanting to greet him in my pajamas, and still mortified by my tears that day; then I pad into the hall and collect the post. Circulars, more bills, an official-looking letter in a buff envelope for Mark. I take the key from its hook beneath the wind
owsill and unlock the front door. It sticks a little, and I pull hard to open it.
But it isn’t the force of opening the door that makes me take a step back, or the icy cold sucked instantly into the warm hall. It isn’t the parcel that rests on the pile of logs to one side of the porch.
It’s the blood smeared across the threshold, and the pile of entrails on the top step.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
They say money is the root of all evil.
The cause of all crime.
There are others like me—other people wandering around in this half existence—and they’re all here because of money.
They didn’t have any; they had too much.
They wanted someone else’s; someone wanted theirs.
And the result?
A life, taken.
But it won’t end there.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
ANNA
The rabbit is on the top step, its stomach cut neatly open in one continuous, careful slice. A gelatinous mass of flesh and guts oozes from within. Glassy eyeballs stare out at the street, above a gaping mouth exposing sharp white teeth.
I open my mouth to scream, but there’s no air in my lungs and I take a step back instead, clutching at the coat stand to the side of the front door. I feel the prickle of my milk letting down, the need to feed my baby an instinctive reaction to danger.
I find air.
“Mark!” The word explodes from me bullet fast. “Mark! Mark!” I keep shouting, unable to tear my eyes away from the bloody mess on our threshold. A morning frost has coated the rabbit and its blood in glistening silver, and the effect serves only to make the spectacle more macabre, like a gothic Christmas decoration. “Mark!”
He comes downstairs at something between a walk and a run, stubbing his toe on the bottom step and swearing loudly. “What the— Jesus . . .” He’s wearing nothing but a towel, and he shivers involuntarily as he stands in the open doorway, staring at the step. Droplets of water cling to the sparse hair on his chest.
“Who would have done such a horrible thing?” I’m crying now, in that post-shock relief that comes with realizing you’re safe.
Mark looks at me, confused. “Who? Don’t you mean what? A fox, presumably. Good job it’s so cold or it’d be stinking.”
“You think an animal did this?”
“A whole park across the road, and it chooses our doorstep. I’ll get some clothes on; then I’ll get rid of it.”
Something doesn’t make sense. I try to work out what, but it slips away from me. “Why didn’t the fox eat it? Look at all that meat and”—I swallow the nausea that threatens my gullet—“the guts. Why kill it, then not eat it?”
“That’s what they do, isn’t it? Urban foxes feed from the trash cans. They kill for fun. If they get into a hen coop they’ll slaughter the whole flock, but they won’t eat a damned one.”
I know he’s right. Years ago my father decided to keep geese, penned in a run at the bottom of the garden. I couldn’t have been older than five or six, but I remember pulling on my wellies and running to collect the eggs and throw grain onto the muddy grass. Despite the geese’s Christmas fate, my mother named them all, calling them individually as she rounded them up at nightfall. Her favorite—and by default, therefore, mine—was a sprightly bird with gray-tipped feathers she called Piper. While the others would hiss and flap their wings if you got too close, Piper would let my mother feed her by hand. Her docility was her undoing. The fox—so bold he didn’t wait for darkness—was deterred by the bad-tempered siblings but clamped his jaws around poor Piper’s neck, leaving her decapitated body for my mother and me to find that evening.
“Filthy animals,” Mark says. “You can see where the fox hunt brigade’s coming from, can’t you?”
I can’t. I’ve never seen a fox in the countryside, but I’ve seen plenty in town, trotting down the center of the street, as bold as you like. They’re so beautiful I can’t imagine terrorizing them in punishment for their own instincts as hunters.
As I stare at the mutilated rabbit, I pinpoint what’s been troubling me. I speak slowly, the thoughts solidifying along with the words.
“There’s too much blood.”
There’s a pool of it beneath the lifeless rabbit, and more on the three steps down to the drive. Gentle amusement shows on Mark’s face as he takes in my announcement.
“I remember dissecting frogs in fourth-form biology, but we never did a rabbit. How much blood should there be?”
The sarcasm irritates me. Why isn’t he seeing what I’m seeing?
I try to stay calm. “Let’s suppose a fox did it. And let’s suppose there’s enough blood in a tiny wild rabbit to produce this mess in front of us. Did it wipe its paws on the other steps?”
Mark laughs, but I’m not joking.
“Did it use its tail to paint smears of blood?”
Because that’s what it looks like; like someone has taken a paintbrush, dipped it into the rabbit, and covered our steps with irregular daubs of blood. It looks, I realize with sudden clarity, like a crime scene.
Mark becomes serious. He puts a strong arm around me and uses his free hand to close the door; then he turns me to face him. “Tell me. Tell me who did this.”
“I don’t know who did it. But they did it because I went to the police. They did it because they know something about Mum’s death, and they want to stop me finding out about it.” Voicing my theory does nothing to make it sound less fantastical.
Mark is impassive, although I detect a hint of concern. “Sweetheart, this doesn’t make sense.”
“You think this is normal? An anonymous card yesterday, and now this?”
“Okay, let’s think this through. Suppose the card wasn’t someone being spiteful—”
“It wasn’t.”
“What did they want to achieve by questioning your mother’s death?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer. “And what do they want to achieve by scaring you with dead animals on the doorstep?”
I can see his point. It feels disjointed. Why push me toward the police, then warn me off?
He takes my silence as defeat.
“It was a fox, sweetheart.” Mark moves forward and kisses my forehead. “I promise. Why don’t I take Ella while you have a nice bath? I haven’t got a client till eleven today.”
I let Mark lead me upstairs and run me a bath, putting in some of the ludicrously expensive bath salts he bought me when Ella was born, which I’ve never had time to use. I soak beneath the bubbles, thinking about foxes, rabbits, blood. Wondering if I’m paranoid.
I picture the anonymous card; imagine the sender’s hand sliding it into the envelope, putting it in the postbox. Did that same person cut open a rabbit with surgical precision? Smear blood across the steps of my house?
My pulse won’t slow down. It beats a staccato rhythm in my temple and I sink lower in the bath, letting the hum of the water fill my ears instead. Someone wants to frighten me.
I wonder if the two acts are really that disjointed after all? I saw the anonymous card as a call to action, a direction to look into my mother’s death. But what if it wasn’t an instruction, but a warning?
Think again.
A warning that Mum’s death wasn’t as it seemed; that someone out there meant my family harm. Still does.
I close my eyes and see blood, so much blood. Already my memory is playing tricks on me. How big was the rabbit? Was there really that much blood?
Photographs.
The thought occurs suddenly, and I sit up, sloshing water over the side of the bath. I’ll take dozens of pictures and then I can take them to Murray Mackenzie at the police station and see if he thinks it could have been a fox.
A tiny voice asks if I’m doing this to convince Mark or to convince the police. I bat it away,
pull the plug, and hop out, drying myself with such haste my clothes stick to my damp skin.
I find my phone and rush downstairs, but Mark has already cleared away the dead rabbit and washed the steps with bleach. When I open the front door there’s nothing there at all. It’s as if it never happened.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
MURRAY
Winter sun filtered through the bedroom curtains as Murray got dressed. He tucked the duvet underneath the pillows and smoothed out the wrinkles before arranging the cushions the way Sarah liked. Opening the curtains, he noted the thick gray clouds rolling in from the north and put a V-neck sweater over his shirt.
Later, once the dishwasher was on and he’d pushed the Hoover around, and the first load of laundry was hanging on the line, Murray sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit. It was half past nine. The hours stretched out in front of him. He remembered a time when a morning off was full of promise, full of expectation.
He drummed his fingers on the table. He would go and see Sarah. Spend the morning with her—perhaps he could persuade her to go to the café or to take a walk around the grounds—and go on to work from there.
* * *
• • •
He was buzzed in by Jo Dawkins, Sarah’s caseworker, who had worked at Highfield for the last ten years.
“I’m sorry, love. She’s having a bad day.”
A bad day meant Sarah didn’t want to see him. Ordinarily, Murray would go straight home, accepting that everyone had times when they wanted to be alone. Today he felt different. He missed Sarah. He wanted to talk about the Johnson job.
“Would you try again? Tell her I won’t stay long.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” Jo left him in reception, the hall of the original country house. It had been clumsily converted, long before listed buildings had become something to protect. Thick fire doors, all with key-code access, led off to wards and offices, and ugly wood-chip paper covered both walls and ceiling.