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She walked slowly into her sitting-room. Here, as in the hall, everything had been restored and replaced exactly as it had originally been, but here too there were flowers, a large jug of them in the hearth and then a slightly smaller display on the round table behind the settee.
And they must have been freshly delivered, she reflected as she touched the petals of the massed arrangement of sweet peas, because these were still slightly damp.
Slowly she made her way to the kitchen, pausing only briefly at the foot of the stairs as she walked past them, trying to ignore the sudden surge of panic that hit her stomach.
The bedroom. Could she really face going up there?
She fiddled with the flex of the kettle, a new one, but exactly like her old one. As she glanced through the window she saw that the plants in her terracotta pots were enjoying the sunshine, opening their petals to it. She frowned a little as she recognised that someone must have been watering and feeding them for them to look so healthy. Her insurance broker had obviously gone to a great deal of trouble.
She must thank him, she recognised absently as she marvelled at the way even the plates on the dresser had been replaced in their original positions.
Somewhere in the distance the wail of an ambulance siren broke the silence.
The sound made Debra blink. She had dreaded coming back here so much, feared to do so because she had been so convinced that, no matter how much clearing up had been done, she would still see and smell the filth with which Kevin Riley had desecrated it.
And yet now, standing in her kitchen, breathing in the smell of fresh paint, looking through the window to the peaceful scene outside, it seemed as though that violence, that ugliness could never possibly have happened.
But she still had to go upstairs.
Shivering a little, she walked back into the hall. The scent of the flowers seemed stronger now.
She paused to study them, sharply aware of the stairs behind her and of the dread clogging her throat and racing her heart.
Her hand trembled as she placed it on the banister. The wood was smooth and warm beneath her fingertips.
Slowly she walked up the stairs, tensing a little as one of them creaked slightly under her weight.
At the top she stopped.
All the doors were open, as though somehow someone had left them like that deliberately, so that there were no secrets, no hidden dangers.
Her own bedroom door was the nearest, but she went into the spare room first, exhaling jerkily as she studied its clean prettiness.
Like the kitchen, the bathroom had been restored exactly as though she were still living there, right down to her favourite shower gel and toiletries.
All that was left now was her bedroom.
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, opening them again, quickly afraid of the mental visions her memory might conjure up. She had gone this far. Wasn’t that enough? she asked herself. Marsh had said nothing about her going in every room. Hadn’t the mere fact that she was here proved that he was wrong?
To others, perhaps, but not to herself, she acknowledged shakily.
She walked jerkily into the bedroom and then came to in an immediate shocked halt, the breath leaving her lungs as though she had been punched.
Where downstairs everything was as it had always been, here in her bedroom nothing was the same.
On the wall where her bed-head had been, where that awful, terrifying photograph had been, there were now fitted hand-painted wardrobes, pretty feminine ones with glass doors and soft fabric curtains behind them.
The bed was now facing the window, the sun pouring in, to highlight the soft peaches and creams of the intricately quilted bedspread.
Her furniture, the pretty little desk and chest were still there; and so were her other small treasures; the silver-back hairbrushes; the pretty antique jars with their silver tops.
The fabrics, the colours, her personal things, all these were just as they had always been, but the room itself was completely different; so different that surely only someone who knew her, really knew her and understood her feelings, could possibly be responsible for those changes.
Leigh perhaps. Her mother. Her heart ached suddenly with the burden of her own guilt. She had not been the easiest person to live with since the break-in, and she certainly didn’t deserve the consideration, the thoughtfulness, the love she was witnessing here in this room.
She moved towards the bed, touching the quilt where the sun was on it. It felt warm and soft, and then abruptly a small sound registered in her awareness, shocking her whole body into terrified, frozen immobility.
Someone was coming up the stairs. She had heard that betraying stair creak. Someone was in the house with her.
