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THURSDAY
Sasha
Sasha tries another take. She wants her content to be perfect. She’s been getting good engagement across her social media platforms lately, but it’s hard work.
She’s filming in the Manor’s entrance hall, where the Tudor staircase is the backdrop. Sasha has placed tea lights on each step and woven some foliage from the garden around the banister. It looks magical, a set fit for a costume drama, and it makes her posts stand out from the usual wellness and yoga content.
The dream is that if she increases her social media following, she can put her prices up and teach less. Or she can start to do some sponsored posts and get paid for them. She’s the only person living at the Manor who earns money, and she feels the pressure. Olly likes a good lifestyle. He’s drunk Nick Creed’s wine cellar dry and he has a taste for expensive food. So, her efforts are important. And even if her and Olly’s plan comes off,they will still be important to her because Sasha’s dream is to become an influencer in the yoga and wellness world. She doesn’t just want money. Why should he be the only one with career ambitions?
She walks down the stairs slowly, talking to camera. The take is going well until Olly bursts in. He shoves a book at her.
‘Anna’s journal,’ he says. ‘I found it.’ He’s amped up, shaking the book in her face. It’s been forever since he referred to Kitty as Anna and it sounds jarring. ‘And don’t worry, I left everything as I found it. She won’t know I was there. And there was a plant, by the way. She wasn’t lying about that.’
She stares at the journal. ‘Is this the one she said she’d thrown out?’ They tried so hard to get Anna to hand it over after Kitty’s last night. They were terrified it might incriminate them somehow. Wow. This is a much bigger lie than Sasha thought Anna was capable of. ‘You shouldn’t have taken it! What if she notices it’s gone? Why didn’t you just photograph the pages?’
‘You said you’d keep her busy in the Orangery.’
‘Just long enough for you to check for the plant,’ she hisses. ‘What if she decides to pop home for something and notices this is missing?’
‘She won’t,’ he hisses back. ‘Stop focusing on that and look at this.’ He flicks through the book, and she sees pages and pages of handwriting. ‘I’ve only read the beginning,’ he says. ‘You’re going to want to, too.’
She takes it from him and opens it. Anna has written in ballpoint pen. Sasha runs her fingertips over the indentations it’s made on the paper. I can feel her concentration, Sasha thinks.
‘Where was it?’ she asks.
‘In her bedroom, in plain sight.’
Even more reason not to take it, Sasha thinks, but there’s no point in saying it. He’ll get tetchy. When she feels frustrated with him, she reminds herself that they’re playing a long game, and she has to hand it to Olly: he gets things wrong, he can be overconfident, and dare she think it, just plain stupid sometimes, but if it wasn’t for him, they wouldn’t be living in the Manor at all. He saw how good Sasha was with people and encouraged her to be choosy about who she befriended, to spot opportunities. We’re never going to get given anything on a plate, he insisted. We need to hustle for it. It made perfect sense to Sasha. She’s a hard worker, a grafter, but she realised she’d been waiting for life to happen to her, rather than making it happen herself. Olly opened her eyes to another way. He told her about Libby Franklin.
She reads the first few lines of the journal: ‘It’s time you moved on,’ Kitty said. I was reading my book in Nick’s study, minding my own business, when she just walked in and blurted it out as if she’d been thinking about it for ages.
This must be right before I met her, Sasha thinks. It takes her back to Anna turning up at her first yoga lesson, and how much of a deer in headlamps she was. The first time she came, Sasha was looking out for her, but she would have noticed her anyway. Unlike the other, chatty women, Anna’s body language was depressed. She crept into the class, shoulders bowed, head down, and hovered anxiously before taking a place at the back. She repeatedly and awkwardly tugged down the hem of her T-shirt. It confirmed everything that Sasha had been told. Anna Creed was not in a good place.
Sasha didn’t approach her right away, intuiting that if she was overbearing, Anna might scuttle off and never come back. Instead, she gave her a warm, welcoming smile, made just one or two encouraging interventions and kept the pace gentle with a focus on restorative poses. She knew it might annoy some of her regulars who were there for something more challenging, but they could put up with it. Sasha’s goal was befriending Anna, and this was the first time she had her in her sights.
She flicks through more pages of the diary, skim-reading sentences here and there. Reliving their past from Anna’s point of view is both familiar and strange.
There are things that Sasha had forgotten. It fascinates her to read Anna’s account of how her actions unfolded. She takes pleasure from the sense of a job well executed and successfully completed, but there’s something about seeing inside Anna’s mind that’s also disconcerting. She’s never thought of how Anna experienced this period because she was too focused on her goal at the time: to convince Anna that everything they were doing was in Anna’s best interests, while getting her to do what they wanted.
‘Is that her?’ Olly says. They listen.
Kitty’s coming.
Sasha snaps the journal shut and hands it to Olly. ‘Take it upstairs, photograph every page and then put it back exactly where you found it. I’ll keep her busy.’
As he runs upstairs, she takes a deep breath. Thank goodness they found this. The thought of it getting into the hands of anyone else, and especially those detectives, makes her nervous.Hal Steen and Jen, the female detective, are not the types to have the wool pulled over their eyes easily. She needs them to stay focused on Tom Booth and not on what’s happening here at the Manor.
For a moment she’s tempted to run up after Olly because she should have flicked to the end of the journal. It’s the end that matters the most.
38
THURSDAY
Nicole
At the sound of Patrick’s car, his phone falls from Nicole’s trembling hand onto the stone floor. The corner dents and a spiderweb of cracks appears across the screen. When she picks it up, pieces of glass flake off. The phone is dead. Her hand shakes.
Outside, the car engine dies. A bass still thumps. She can feel it in her chest. Then the music goes off, too.
