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‘Kitty,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ she replies. The tomatoes are in a bowl. She slits their skins, pours boiling water over them, and keeps her back to him.
‘Do you remember the diary you used to write?’
It takes every ounce of her self-control not to tense up physically. She can feel his eyes on her back.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I enjoyed it at first, but it got boring very quickly.’
‘Do you ever look over it? I was thinking that must be a nice thing to do. Nostalgic.’
She turns to face him and keeps her expression slack and innocent. ‘No. I think I threw it away. There wasn’t a word in it worth rereading. I’m no writer. Not like you.’
‘Right,’ he says, after a beat. She turns back to the countertop and reaches for an onion to slice. Her heart is thumping. She’s got no choice but to stick to her original story but it feels dangerous. After a moment or two he leaves the room. When she hears the door to his study slam, she flinches. For a moment the world seems to tilt and she fears she might lose her nerve but forces herself to carry on preparing the soup. As soon as it’s done, she’ll leave. She wants to get back to the Barn as soon as she can. She no longer feels safe here.
She has a strong urge to confide in Nicole. I want to be her friend, she realises, but I can’t be if I’m lying to her. How would she drop her bombshell on a total stranger? She’d have to just come out and say it:I’m not Kitty. I’m Anna Creed. I’m the true lady of the Manor. But she doesn’t know if she dares.
As she works, she begins to feel calmer. She puts the radio on, quietly, as she normally would. It’s important that she doesn’tseem different to Olly and Sasha. She sees Sasha walk past the kitchen door and a few seconds later hears a faint knock and then the sound of Olly’s study door opening and shutting.
I could eavesdrop on them, she thinks. The idea of it is terrifying, but compelling. It might tell her what they’re thinking and planning. She leaves the vegetables on the side, walks softly down the corridor and slips into the room next door to Olly’s study without making a sound. It’s called the Map Room because of a large and very old map of the peninsula hanging on one wall, but it isn’t much used. There are many rooms in the Manor like this. They keep them largely shut, and the furniture is draped with dust sheets.
She easily moves a section of wall panel to give her access to the space between the Map Room and Olly’s study. Olly and Sasha’s voices are instantly audible, but she can’t hear what they’re saying. She’ll need to be inside the space and put her ear to the back of the study panelling for that. She clambers into it, as slowly and carefully as she can, to avoid them hearing her.
‘It’s Anna!’ Olly says. His voice is raised. ‘She started all this. It’s her bloody fault.’
Anna feels her chest tighten.
Sasha shushes him and says something back to him in a low voice that Anna can’t hear. It doesn’t reassure him.
‘I swear to God, I’ll kill—’ Olly says. Anna doesn’t wait to hear the rest. She pulls herself out of the alcove, puts the panel back in place, then moves to the door, hoping to get out, but she hears Olly’s study door open and a set of footsteps coming down the hall. What if they’re looking for her?
She stands behind the door, her back to the wall. Opposite her, on the wall, is a very old map of Lancaut. Nick loved it. When they bought the Manor, he made it a condition of sale that the previous owner left it here. She stares at it, trying to moderate her breathing, trying not to make a sound, wishing with all her heart that Nick had never died, that none of this had happened.
She takes in every detail of the map, to try to distract her from what might be happening outside the room. If they find her in here, she has nowhere to run. The map shows the Manor, when only the oldest parts of it were complete. The chapel is there, too, and the medieval village. The mapmaker has drawn in the woodland, and it covers the whole peninsula. There are no fields, no sign of the barns that Nicole and Tom Booth converted. This map is too old. She sees it, then, a detail that makes her catch her breath: the plague pit.
Of course, she thinks. That’s it. How could she have forgotten about it? Olly didn’t bury Kitty in the graveyard, he buried her in the plague pit. She had the right idea about him using a place where bodies were already buried, but the wrong location. She needs to move the camera. But just as this gives her a little bit of hope, she realises that she might be too late and have missed her chance to catch them moving the body.
She’ll have to go to the plague pit and see for herself.
64
THE DAY OF HIS DEATH: 12:27
Tom
It’s the man from the wood, the camper.
‘I told you to go,’ Tom says. He can’t believe the audacity of the guy.
‘Nice place,’ the man says. ‘What did you do? Win the lottery?’ The look on his face is contemptuous. You feel morally superior, Tom thinks, because I’m rich and you’re not. You think you can come here and steal from me and not feel guilty about it. He fingers the phone in his pocket, thinking of ringing emergency services, before remembering that his phone is dead.
‘There are cameras filming you right now,’ he says, even though he recalls that he disabled them.
‘Give me what I want, erase the footage and I won’t hurt you. I’ll go.’
‘I’m just like you,’ Tom says. He feels desperate to make this point, because perhaps if the man gets it they can come to an understanding and avoid this ugliness, but he laughs.
‘No, mate, you’re not. You’re a privileged little shit.’
