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42
Lucy and the children climb out of the Uber outside the Angel Inn. It’s a 1920s building, on the cusp of deco and nouveau, with metal-framed windows and an ornate chrome revolving door. It’s not as slick as the Dayville, but it is more charming, more to Lucy’s taste; less, she imagines, to Henry’s.
In the foyer, Lucy grasps Stella’s hand and heads towards the reception area.
‘Hi,’ she says. ‘We’re looking for my brother. He goes either by the name of Henry Lamb, or Joshua Harris. This is him. Is he staying here?’
She turns her phone to the receptionist. The receptionist smiles and nods. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘That’s Mr Harris. He was staying here. But he checked out at lunchtime.’
Lucy feels a punch of surprise in her gut. ‘Lunchtime today?’
‘Yes. I’m so sorry you missed him!’
‘And you don’t know where he went?’
‘No. I’m so sorry. He didn’t say. But he left on foot? If that’s of any help?’
Lucy turns to Marco and Marco nods. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘That is helpful. Very helpful indeed. Thank you so much.’
They leave the hotel and stand for a while on the pavement. It’s still light and the streets are busy; early diners at pavement tables are being served large glasses of wine that catch the long golden sunrays. They look around themselves for a while, as if they might just see Henry pulling his suitcase along behind him at any minute.
‘Now what?’ asks Marco.
Lucy shrugs. ‘God knows. I mean, he left on foot. Not by taxi. So he must still be here somewhere.’ She looks around again, her eyes searching for a dash of blond highlighted hair, the curve of his shoulders, the distinctive slap of his feet in designer trainers or expensive leather shoes. But of course he is not there. Of course he isn’t. ‘Shall we get some dinner, maybe?’ She casts her eye again across the cafés and the pavement tables and the glasses of cold white wine glittering in the evening sun.
But Stella is yawning. It is gone midnight in London. She’s been awake for nearly a day. They take an Uber back to the Dayville and they order room service and by 8 p.m. all three of them are fast asleep. Even Lucy.
The following morning, Lucy awakes inside the dark heat of an anxiety dream, and for a moment when she opens her eyes she has no idea where she is, feels almost as though she is upside down, that the ceiling is the floor and the floor is the ceiling, and that thewalls are sliding in towards her. She sits bolt upright and catches her breath. She sees Stella’s curls on the pillow beside her and hears Marco snoring gently from around the corner in the living area. She grabs her phone to check the time. It’s just gone 8 a.m. She has slept for twelve hours but still feels exhausted.
She rubs her face and has a shower, one of those showers that doesn’t make her feel any cleaner, despite the heat of the water and the tang of grapefruit extract in the body wash. She sits on the edge of the bed in a hotel robe with her hair wrapped in a towel turban and picks up her phone.
Her heart skips a beat and then races. There is a barrage of messages from Libby on WhatsApp. The dog, she thinks at first, something has happened to the dog. But no. It is not the dog. It is something far, far worse.
Mum. I don’t want to freak you out and I’m sure it’s nothing, but some police came to see me yesterday.
They were asking questions about you and about Henry. Asking if you were alive, if you’d ever been in touch with me about the inheritance.
I lied as best as I could.
But I fucked up a bit. I said that Fitz was my mum’s dog. Then I had to pretend it was my other mum’s dog but I could tell he knew that was wrong. I could tell he knew I was lying about everything.
But it’s Libby’s final message that sends a stab of sheer panic through her gut.
They said they were looking into the murder of Birdie Dunlop-Evers. I just made out like I’d never heard of her. I think they believed me. I think it’s going to be OK.
Lucy lets the phone drop on the bed.
Birdie Dunlop-Evers.
The sight of her name in Libby’s text messages is enough to make her flesh crawl. Her vision grows black, her head fills with dark fog, her nostrils fill with the smell of Birdie’s scalp, the stale heat of her breath against her cheek as she sternly moved her fingertips up and down the strings of the battered violin she taught Lucy to play on.
She remembers the games that Birdie played with Lucy’s head towards the end, the way she brought Lucy into her relationship with David, made Lucy feel special with hair ties and nail polish and time spent doing illicit activities away from the gaze of the others; she remembers sitting on Birdie’s mattress eating Maltesers out of a family-sized bag while Birdie watched her with greedy eyes. She remembers a copy ofSmash Hits. A packet of fruit-flavoured chewing gum. A squirt of designer perfume from a bottle with a gold bow on it. A pair of claret suede shoes with kitten heels which she modelled for David Thomsen while Birdie preened over her. She remembers how David had encroached a little closer into the space that she and Birdie inhabited every single time they were together; first a distant observer, then an active observer, then a part of her and Birdie’s team until one day Birdie was gone and she was alone with David. At the time she had felt honoured and thrilled that David wanted to spend time with her without Birdie. She’d felt it as a tingling necklace of ice around her neck, a roil in her stomach, a dark glow in her body, a thing that she wanted even though she didn’t know what it was: attention, maybe, but more than that. She wanted love. She wantedlove so much she ached with it. And that was what David Thomsen called it. He called it love.
And though she has thought of David often across the years, she has rarely thought of Birdie – she sidled off the pages of Lucy’s interior story a long time ago. A footnote. A smell. A shred of something. But now Birdie is filling her whole head, every atom of her being, every thread of her psyche. Birdie with her waist-length hair and pretty hands, her small teeth and clipped English vowels; Birdie with her dead blue eyes. And now that Lucy is a woman, a mother three times over, now that she is older than Birdie will ever get to be, she knows that the precious little gifts and secret whisperings and perfume spritzes were all designed to make her feel comfortable enough and special enough and important enough to believe that having sex with a forty-six-year-old man when she was only thirteen was a good thing. Lucy knows now that Birdie groomed her on behalf of David, she knows that Birdie was a monster. And she knows that Birdie died from a blow to the head and she knows that it was all to do with Henry. The three bodies in the kitchen. Birdie dead in the bedroom. Phin tied to the radiator. The dead cat. The baby her mother lost at five months gestation. That it’s all tied in with Henry, all of it, but she’s never quite been able to work out how. She just remembers the shock of seeing Birdie without her life force, without her power, a flaccid puppet, a nothing, the unworldly weight of her body as she helped Henry carry it on to the roof of the house on Cheyne Walk …
And now, somehow, Lucy has no idea how, a policeman in London has discovered that Birdie is dead and has decided that itmust have something to do with the people she once lived with, and she has no idea how this policeman in London has made this connection and how things have got to the point of this policeman arriving on her daughter’s doorstep in St Albans and asking her uncomfortable questions about her family set-up, but she knows that those questions won’t stop once they start, that more questions will follow like steps in a dance until they get to the point in Lucy’s life, almost a year ago, when she did something shocking, something terrible, and she feels the noose around her neck growing tighter and tighter until she almost cannot breathe.
