Was the little supermarket still on the other side of the airport? She vaguely remembered it from last time she’d been home and thought it was, and so she locked up Deux Tourelles, put her purse and keys into the basket on the front of the bike and went off to stock up on food for a few nights.
After cooking a simple supper of spaghetti and puttanesca sauce from a jar, Lucy found a record player and some old records and knelt down to flick through the collection. It included Judy Garland, Doris Day and Bing Crosby along with some classical records. Dido obviously loved her music.
‘Ah-ha,’ she said, pulling out a Billie Holiday record. ‘That’s more like it. Music to drink wine to,’ she said and then laughed at herself for talking out loud. She didn’t realise she was doing it at home but then, this wasn’t her home and everything felt unfamiliar, even herself.
The record player told Lucy a lot about Dido. The fact Dido had owned records told Lucy the elderly lady had been reluctant to fast-forward into the twentieth century let alone the twenty-first. But it was wired up to a large, although not particularly modern set of speakers so maybe, once upon a time, Dido hadbeen interested in pushing forward parts of her daily life rather than living in the past.
She wondered if that was true of most older people? Her elderly next-door neighbour in Camberwell was very modern in comparison, but it was only now Lucy realised that. She’d been forever Internet shopping with parcels arriving from Amazon couriers on a daily basis. And being freelance, Lucy was always the one to take delivery of them when her neighbour had been out.
Lucy cast around for a computer or laptop just out of curiosity as to whether Dido had owned one. An old radio with a dial sat on the sideboard. She twiddled it and, unable to make it play, assumed it was broken. It was only then she noticed there was no television. It seemed a lonely experience, living with no TV. Lucy rarely turned hers on at home but she at least had one for background noise or to keep up with the news. But then perhaps Dido had always preferred music and the radio.
So it was the sounds ofThe Best of Billie Holiday, cranked up as loud as the speakers would allow, that kept Lucy company as total curiosity took over and she began venturing round the house, something she hadn’t been able to do thus far under Clara’s watchful gaze. Was it wrong to look through a dead relation’s house? Especially if you hadn’t known them? Was it snooping? It was really, but she was likely going to be in charge of sorting items for charity, packing up anything and selling it on behalf of her dad, as he wasn’t exactly catching a flight home soon from the Caribbean.
‘Five bedrooms,’ Lucy counted as she went round the immaculately made-up rooms complete with an abundance of dried flowers in vases and doilies on dressing tables, the mirrors spotted with age. The rooms were dust-free. Had Dido had a cleaner? Or did she clean the house herself? Rather too large for one person, Lucy mused. But it would make a wonderful family home. Although, who needed five bedrooms?
Lucy put her wine down on a doily and began opening chests of drawers – empty other than for a few floral-themed paper liners and bags of dried lavender that had long since lost their scent. Other rooms were the same, all traces of past lives eradicated through time, only the bulky furniture remaining.
She had already had a glimpse of Dido’s belongings when choosing the dress for the funeral and the boxes in the wardrobe called out to her, although she realised in all the fuss of her arrival, Dido’s funeral and then beating a hasty retreat from Clara’s earlier that day that she’d taken the box to Clara’s as the two sisters had meant to go through it together.
At that moment, Lucy didn’t want to see her sister. That slap. What had it all meant? Would Lucy be the one to reach out to Clara or vice versa? Right now, she didn’t know. They’d always had a fractious relationship. One of Lucy’s friends had once listened to them both passively-aggressively arguing about a dinner reservation when Clara came over to stay, and had called them ‘frenemies’, but that seemed such a strange phrase to apply to siblings.
Even so, they’d never become physical with each other before. The shock of the slap was wearing off and Lucy, far from angry, was curiously puzzled. And perhaps actually, yes, a little bit angry if she really thought about it. At St Peter Port, Clara had shown no glimmer of remorse as she strode away to the solicitor’s. Instead, she had looked vindicated, as if she’d been itching to slap Lucy for the best part of three decades and had finally built up to it; the culmination of years of potted resentment.
Looking in at the shoeboxes once again just to be sure she hadn’t missed anything interesting, she decided the document box at Clara’s wasn’t going anywhere and could stay at her sister’s quite happily, unlike Lucy. But before she went back to her little flat, Lucy did want to take a better look; if only to sit and translate the shorthand from some of the notes they’d found inside.
Lucy chose a cosy bedroom at the front with pretty wallpaper, peeling at the top where it met the picture rail. It wasn’t Dido’s.The idea of sleeping in Dido’s room felt disrespectful, and even though she hadn’t actually died in there, a little too creepy.
Downstairs Billie Holiday changed track and something faster than the luxuriant melodies of before began. The fast tempo of ‘What a Little Moonlight Can Do’ made Lucy want to break into a Charleston so she did, only for a moment or two. Her reflection in the floor-length mirror made her laugh. She’d never been much good at dancing. The vibrations of her feet on the uneven floorboards dislodged something in the wardrobe and a loud clunk sounded from within as something fell.
Lucy stopped dancing and went to retrieve the item that had fallen and to put it back in position. It was a camera, an old-fashioned one she thought she recognised from one of her copywriting jobs for a vintage company as a Kodak Box Brownie. Given its age, Lucy wondered if she’d completely killed it or if it might still work after being bashed about like that, although the only camera she knew how to use was the one on her mobile. She turned the Brownie over in her hands, looking at the frayed strap and the catches and deciding that its name was accurate. It really did look like a little brown box.
Lucy swayed. Suddenly the music seemed too loud whereas a moment ago it hadn’t. The wine, the volume Billie Holiday was emitting, the slap … Lucy rubbed her temples. It had been a long day and the thought of curling up in bed sounded both alluring and appalling all at once. She would go and turn the music off in a moment. Then she’d close up the house and double-check everything was locked. It was the size of the house that was unnerving her. Its rambling layout meant she knew if there was an unlikely break-in during the night she might not hear it. And then she’d be murdered in her sleep. Lucy looked at the wine accusingly, walked to the bathroom and tipped the rest of it into the old white Victoriana sink.
Night was already drawing in. Any semblance of bravery she might have felt on arrival at Dido’s house had waned. She turnedthe little camera round, wondering how on earth one went about operating it, and if she even dared open it all up to take a peek at its inner workings – she might accidentally destroy it.
Downstairs the music stopped suddenly, halfway through the song, the needle on the record player making a horrific scratching noise that chilled Lucy. Still in the bathroom, clutching the empty wine glass in one hand and the camera in the other, she didn’t dare move. Instead she stared at herself in the mirror over the sink. Her scared reflection returned her wide-eyed gaze.Record players don’t make that noise of their own accord, do they?Something instinctively told her someone, or something, had lifted the needle roughly.
Slowly she made her way out of the bathroom and crept stealthily down the stairs, acutely aware that the steps creaked and she winced every time they did. She approached the sitting room and, holding her breath, looked round the door to see the back of a man with dark hair. He was standing by the record player and while his body was still, he appeared to be looking around the room, his head moving slowly.
She took a breath, ready to call at him to find out who he was, then paused, wondering if she should grab the empty, heavy cut-glass vase from the front hall first as some sort of weapon. Hearing her quick intake of breath he swung round and stared at her.
‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded.
Lucy stared at him and stepped back a pace in the doorway. ‘Who are you?’ she countered. ‘How did you get in?’ She looked the thirty-something man up and down and her first instinct told her he wasn’t there to rob the house or kill her, given he was wearing a blue and white striped apron and holding a barbeque spatula.
‘I live down there,’ he said angrily wielding the spatula in the direction of the window. ‘In the cottage.’
‘What cottage? Why are you in my house?’ she asked. It wasn’t her house. She wasn’t sure why she’d said it. It was either that or stutter her way through a complex explanation of what she wasdoing there and why. She didn’t owe this man a convoluted set of details.
‘Your house?’ he asked. ‘This isn’t your house.’
Lucy sighed. ‘No. But I’m staying here and—’
‘Who are you?’ he asked again.
‘It’s none of your business,’ Lucy said.
He looked at her, his eyes so dark she could barely see his pupils. ‘I thought someone was breaking in,’ he explained warily. ‘Trashing the place.’
