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‘Is Patrick there?’
This man is rude, she thinks, wishing she hadn’t picked up. ‘He’s taking his car to be mended. I expect he’ll be back in an hour or two, latest. Can I give him a message?’
‘He’s taking his car to be mended? Is that what he told you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I mean is that if he doesn’t call me back and tell me that he’s going to pay me the money he owes me in full I’m going to hunt him down and break his fucking legs and his fucking arms and his fucking life. And if he ever threatens me again, I won’t just break his life, I’ll take it. So, where is he exactly, darling, because he’s not at home? I’m sitting outside his gaff now.’
Nicole pulls the phone away from her ear and her hands shake as she ends the call. It buzzes again and she throws it onto the sofa.
Patrick has been lying. About everything. He’s in debt, and a lot of it, by the sounds of things. He hasn’t changed at all. These are the sort of people she and Tom warned him against.
She remembers the anger in his voice last night. The threat he made:Try that and I’ll hurt you. She’ll have to confront him and ask him to leave, but she’s frightened by the prospect. Her mind searches for a solution. Perhaps she could lock him out. Tell the system not to accept his pin.
The security hub recognises her face and presents her with the same menu she saw when she and Patrick enabled his pin, but her mind’s a blank. She can’t remember what they did, and her brain is too jittery and fried to work it out. She’ll have to go back to the Manor House and ask for help.
Questions pile up as she laces up her trainers. To have lied to her this completely, Patrick must be desperate. For what? For her money? She can’t come up with anything else. It sickens her to think that his compassion for her has been fake. If Tom knew, he’d be devastated. She pulls her laces tight. She’ll go to the Manor and ask Olly and Sasha for help, and she won’t come back until Patrick has moved out of the Barn. She never wants to see him again.
She stands up, momentarily dizzy. At first, she thinks what she hears is the roar of her own blood in her ears, but a moment later she realises she’s wrong. Patrick must have clocked that he left his phone behind. What she can hear is the throaty sound of his Jaguar coming back up the drive.
35
THURSDAY
Olly
Olly stands in the Coach House. He sneaks into Kitty’s home periodically. It’s easy to do. A spare key to the Coach House lives in a drawer in the Manor House’s kitchen. Not that she locks it often.
When Kitty got back from town, she seemed quite normal, and when Sasha asked she said that she’d had her hair cut and done some shopping.
Olly couldn’t see any difference in her hair, but Sasha said the split ends had been cut off and it looked better. Sasha asked what shopping she’d done, phrasing it beautifully as if she was truly interested, the way Sasha can, and Kitty said she’d seen a pop-up houseplant sale and gone in. ‘I bought a lovely succulent for the Coach House, and I treated myself to a cup of tea and a slice of cake,’ she said.
It sounded plausible, but neither he nor Sasha could get past the feeling that Kitty wasn’t behaving quite as normal. And if there’s one thing that they’re expert at, it’s observing her, and intervening if she seems to be thinking for herself too much. This behaviour is a small red flag, but it’s a red flag, nonetheless.
He’s here in the Coach House to check on her. If he can’t see a new houseplant, he’s going to know she was lying.
Olly looks around the living area. Kitty lives in three rooms: an open-plan sitting room and kitchen/diner, a bedroom and bathroom. They’re compact spaces but reasonably pleasant and airy, in Olly’s view. The word ‘cosy’ makes him shudder, but he supposes you could apply it here. The spaces are sparsely furnished because Kitty said that she didn’t need much when she moved in. In fact, she insisted on it, blathering on about how it would be a relief not to be surrounded by all her old stuff from the Manor, that it would help her declutter her mind and allow her to focus on the new her. It was laughable. The only things of value she took were two oil paintings which Olly discovered were worth something when he googled the artist, though they’re extremely dull and not nearly as valuable as the carriage clock that she displays on the mantel shelf. He has his eye on that. It would look much better in his study.
He inspects her bookshelves and isn’t surprised to see that her paperbacks are still mostly romance or crime. Nothing of merit has been added since the last time he was here in spite of the recommendations he’s given her.
Kitty’s life is so depressing, it makes him shudder. The dreadful mundanity she embraces is exactly what Olly hasspent his whole life trying to escape. It would be so nice if Kitty wasn’t in their lives at all. Sasha reminds him that they should consider themselves lucky that this is how Kitty wants to live; otherwise, they wouldn’t have the Manor to themselves and wouldn’t get the housekeeping support, and she’s right, but, still, Olly does find Kitty very annoying. Her whole way of living feels like an insult to him; that chronic subservience, the ease with which she shed her identity. He’s read Dostoyevsky and he can relate to the contempt Raskolnikov felt for his victim. Sometimes, it’s hard not to wonder whether Kitty should meet the same fate.
He considers the ease with which they got Anna to move out of the Manor House and into the Coach House after Kitty was gone. All they had to do was tell Anna that she was sleepwalking regularly and behave as if it was troubling them. It freaked them out, they told her, and invaded their privacy, but Anna might also like to know that she wasn’t always covered up when she appeared. They were even considering moving out. Anna was mortified and offered to take herself to the vacant Coach House. It was that easy. It will suit me more, she said.
The day Anna moved they helped her carry her stuff from the Manor to the Coach House. Sasha had spent a week helping her to paint the place and sew new curtains. When her few belongings were in place the two of them sat down for a little lunch with her and toasted her new home with prosecco. It was pitiable.
But in the afternoon, he and Sasha moved into the master suite at the Manor. He bought champagne. They shared thebottle, and it was so good to be able to make love, to talk, or even shout, without worrying that Anna might overhear them. It felt like a triumph and it’s nice to remember it now because he thinks he’s probably taken it for granted for a while, which is a shame, because it was some victory.
He thinks of what they’ve done to Anna over the years as an experiment, of sorts, an interesting study in psychology. He started to consider how far he could push it sometime after she had moved into the Coach House. He asked Sasha: ‘Do you think we can persuade her to be called Kitty? Because to all intents and purposes she’s become Kitty now.’ It was true. She had slipped into Kitty’s role wholly by then. ‘Her jobs keep me busy,’ she protested if they told her she was doing too much for them. ‘I love supporting you both.’
‘That’s sick,’ Sasha told him, and he took it as a challenge.
He decided on a soft start. He suggested laughingly that Anna should change her name to Kitty 2.0 because she was a better version of the original, and watched her reaction. She seemed confused, but not appalled. He called her Kitty once or twice, pretending it was a slip of the tongue, and she didn’t protest. On one occasion she looked uncomfortable, and he said, ‘Forgive me, dear lady. I’m such a twit.’ She laughed and blushed. He tried again a few weeks later. ‘I’m sorry, Anna, but when I see you these days, I keep thinking that Kitty Cat is actually a sweet nickname. I think it suits you.’
‘She’s desperate for attention,’ he told Sasha when she told him to stop, told him he always went too far. ‘She loves it. Watch and learn.’ He kept it up, over months, until he called her Kitty more often than he called her Anna, always with a smile on hisface. He wondered if she would ever work up the courage to ask him not to one day, but she never did. He found it extraordinary. Surely, she would prefer to be called by her real name.
Curious, he asked Sasha to check on Anna’s feelings about it. ‘I’ve never had a nickname before,’ Anna told her. ‘I quite like it. It feels like a fresh start.’
