by Ruth Ware
‘I’m … I’m Isa,’ I said at last. ‘Isa Wilde.’
‘I’m Fatima,’ Fatima said. She dropped her bag to the floor with a little thump, and I saw her looking around, as full of wonder as I was at this Aladdin’s cave of treasures, so different from the plainness of the rest of the school.
‘Well, Fatima,’ Ambrose said, ‘Isa, I am very pleased to meet you.’
He took my hand in his, but he didn’t shake it, as I’d expected. Instead he pressed my fingers between his, a kind of clasp, as if we were promising each other something. His hands were warm and strong, and there was paint so deeply engrained into the lines of his knuckles and the grooves around his nails that I could see no amount of scrubbing could ever remove it.
‘Now,’ he said, waving a hand to the room behind him. ‘Come in. Pick an easel. And most important, make yourselves at home.’
And we did.
Ambrose’s classes were different, we learned that straight away. At first it was the obvious things I noticed – that Ambrose answered to his first name, that none of the girls were wearing ties or blazers, for example.
‘Nothing worse than a tie dragging across your watercolour,’ he said that first day as he invited us to take them off. But it was more than that – something other than straight practicality. A loosening of formality. A space, a much needed space, to breathe, in amongst all the sterile conformity of Salten House.
In class he was a professional – in spite of all the girls who ‘pashed’ on him, unbuttoning their shirts to the point where you could see their bras, as they reached across the canvas. He kept his distance – physically, as well as metaphorically. That first day, when he saw me struggling with my sketch, he came and stood behind me, and I had a sharp memory of my old art mistress, Miss Driver, who used to lean over her students’ shoulders to make alterations, so that you could feel the heat of her pressed against your spine, and smell her sweat.
Ambrose by contrast stood his distance, a foot behind me, silent and contemplative, looking from my page up to the mirror I had propped on the table in front of my easel. We were doing self-portraits.
‘It’s crap, isn’t it?’ I said hopelessly. And then I bit my tongue, expecting a reprimand for the bad language. But Ambrose didn’t even seem to notice. He just stood, his eyes narrowed, seeming hardly to notice me at all, his whole attention fixed on the paper. I held out the pencil, expecting him to draw in corrections like Miss Driver. He took it, almost absently, but he didn’t make a mark on the page. Instead he turned to look at me.
‘It’s not crap,’ he said seriously. ‘But you’re not looking, you’re drawing what you think is there. Look. Really look at yourself in the mirror.’
I turned, trying hard to look at myself, and not at Ambrose’s lined, weathered face standing over my shoulder. All I saw was flaws – the spots on my chin, the hint of baby fat around the jaw, the way my unruly flyaway hair wisped out from the elastic band.
‘The reason it’s not coming together is because you’re drawing the features, not the person. You’re more than a collection of frown lines and doubts. The person I see when I look at you …’ He stopped, and I waited, feeling his eyes on me, trying not to squirm beneath the intensity of his gaze. ‘I see someone brave,’ he said at last. ‘I see someone who’s trying very hard. I see someone who’s nervous, but stronger than she knows. I see someone who’s worried, but doesn’t need to be.’
I felt my cheeks flame, but the words, which would have been unbearably corny coming from anyone else, somehow sounded matter-of-fact, when delivered in Ambrose’s gravelled voice.
‘Draw that,’ he said. He handed the pencil back to me, and his face broke into a smile, crinkling his cheeks, and drawing lines at the corners of his eyes as if someone had sketched them in there and then. ‘Draw the person I see.’
I could find nothing to say. I only nodded.
I can hear his voice in my head now, clipped and husky, so like Kate’s. Draw the person I see.
I still have that drawing somewhere, and it shows a girl whose face is open to the world, a girl with nothing to hide but her own insecurities. But that person, the person Ambrose saw and believed in, she doesn’t exist any more.
Perhaps she never did.
FREYA WAKES AS I tiptoe quietly into Luc’s room (I can’t think of it as anything else) and though I try to lull her back to sleep, she’s having none of it, and in the end I take her into my bed – Luc’s bed – and feed her lying down, bracing myself with an arm arched over her compact little body, so I don’t let my weight fall on top of her when I fall asleep.
I lie there, watching her, and waiting for sleep to claim me, and I think about Ambrose … and Luc … and Kate, all alone now, in this slowly crumbling house, this beautiful millstone around her neck. It is slipping away from her, into the shifting sands of the Reach, and unless she can let go, it will drag her down too.
The house shifts and creaks in the wind, and I sigh and turn my pillow to the cool side.
I should be thinking of Owen and home, but I’m not. I’m thinking of the old days, the long languid summer days we spent here, drinking and swimming and laughing, while Ambrose sketched, and Luc watched us all with his lazy almond-shaped eyes.
Perhaps it’s the room, but Luc feels very present to me in a way he hasn’t for seventeen years, and as I lie there, my eyes closed, the ghosts of his old possessions around me, and the cool of his sheets against my skin, I have the strangest sensation that he is lying next to me – a warm, slender stranger with sun-dark limbs and tangled hair.
The impression is so real that I force myself to turn over and open my eyes to try to dispel the illusion, and of course it’s only Freya and me in the bed, and I shake my head.
What am I coming to? I am as bad as Kate, haunted by the ghosts of the past.
But I remember lying here, one night, long ago, and I have that feeling again of the record skipped in its groove, tracing and retracing the same voices and tracks.
They are here: Luc, Ambrose, and not just them, but ourselves, the ghosts of our past, the slim laughing girls we used to be before that summer ended with a cataclysmic crash, leaving us all scarred in our own ways, trying to move on, lying not for fun, but to survive.
Here, in this house, the ghosts of our former selves are real – as real as the women sleeping around and above me. And I feel their presence, and I understand why Kate can’t leave.
I am almost asleep now, my eyes heavy, and I pick up my phone one last time, checking the clock, before I surrender to sleep. It is as I am putting it down that the light from the screen slants across the gapped, uneven floorboards, and something catches my eye. It is the corner of a piece of paper, sticking up between the boards, with something written on it. Is it a letter? Something written by Luc and lost, or hidden there?
My heart beats as though I am intruding on his privacy, which I am, in a way, but I tug gently at the corner and the dusty, cobwebbed piece of paper slides out.
The page is covered with lines, and seems to be a drawing, but in the dim light from my phone’s screen, I can’t quite make it out. I don’t want to turn on the light and wake Freya, so I take it to the open window, where the curtains flutter in the breeze from the sea, and I hold it up, angling it so the moonlight falls on the page.
It’s a watercolour sketch of a girl, of Kate, I think, and it looks like one of Ambrose’s, though I can’t be sure. The reason I cannot tell for certain is this: the drawing is crossed and slashed again and again with thick black lines, scoring out the face of the girl with lines so thick and vicious that they have torn the paper in places. Pencil holes have been stabbed through where her eyes would have been, if they weren’t obscured by the thicket of scribbles. She has been erased, scratched out, utterly destroyed.
For a minute I just stand there, the piece of paper shivering in the sea breeze, trying to understand what this means. Was it Luc? But I can’t believe that he would do such a thing, he loved Kate. Was
it Kate herself? Impossible though it seems, I can believe that more easily.
I am still standing there, trying to work out the mystery of this hate-filled little thing, when there is a gust of wind, and the curtain flaps, and the piece of paper falls from my fingers. I snatch for it, but the wind has caught it, and all I can do is watch as it flutters towards the Reach and sinks into the milky, muddy water.
Whatever it was, whatever it meant, it’s gone. And as I turn for bed, shivering a little in spite of the warm night, I can’t help thinking – perhaps it’s for the best.
I SHOULD BE tired enough to sleep well, but I don’t. I fall asleep with the scratched-out face in my mind, but when I dream, it’s of Salten House, of the long corridors and winding stairs, and the endless search for rooms I couldn’t find, places that didn’t exist. In my dreams I’m following the others down corridor after corridor, and I hear Kate’s voice up ahead, It’s this way … nearly there! And Fatima’s plaintive cry after her: You’re lying again …
At some point Shadow wakes and barks, and I hear a shushing voice, footsteps, the sound of a door – Kate is putting the dog out.
And then, silence. Or as near to silence as this old, ghost-ridden house ever gets, with its restless creaking resistance against the forces of winds and tides.
When I wake again, it’s to the sound of voices outside, sharp whispers of concern, and I sit up, bleary and confused. It’s morning, the sun filtering through the thin curtains, and Freya is stirring sleepily in a pool of sunshine next to me. When she squawks I pick her up and feed her, but the voices outside are distracting both of us. She keeps raising her head to look around, wondering at the strange room and the strange quality of light – so different to the dusty yellow sunshine that streams into our London flat on summer afternoons. This is a clear, bright light – painful on the eyes and full of movement from the river, and it dances on the ceiling and walls in little pools and patches.
And all the time the voices … quiet, worried voices, with Shadow whining unhappily beneath like a musical counterpoint.
At last I give up, and I wrap Freya in her comforter, and me in my dressing gown, and head downstairs, my bare feet gripping the worn wooden slats of the stairs. The door to the shore side of the Mill is open, and sunlight streams in, but I know before I have even turned the corner of the stairs that something is wrong. There is blood on the stone floor.
I stop at the curve of the stairs, holding Freya hard against my thumping heart, as if she can still the painful banging. I don’t realise how hard I am holding her, until she gives a squeak of protest, and I realise that my fingers are digging into her soft, chubby thighs. I force my fingers to relax, and my feet to follow the staircase to the flagged ground floor, where the bloodstains are.
As I get closer I can see they aren’t random droplets, as I’d thought from the top of the stairs, but paw prints. Shadow’s paw prints. They come inside the front door, circle, and then go swiftly out again as if someone had shooed the dog back outside.
The voices are coming from the land side of the Mill, and I shove my feet into my sandals and walk, blinking into the sunshine.
Outside, Kate and Fatima are standing with their backs to me, Shadow sitting at Kate’s side, still whimpering unhappily. He is on a lead, for the first time since I got here, a very short lead, held tightly in Kate’s lean hand.
‘What’s happened?’ I say nervously, and they turn to look at me, and then Kate stands back, and I see what their bodies have sheltered from my gaze until now.
I inhale sharply, and I clap my free hand over my mouth. When I do manage to speak, my voice shakes a little.
‘Oh my God. Is it … dead?’
It’s not just the sight – I’ve seen death before – it’s the shock, the unexpectedness, the contrast of the bloody mess before us with the blue-and-gold glory of the summer morning. The wool is wet, the high tide must have soaked the body, and now the blood drips slowly through the black slats of the walkway into the muddy shallows. The tide is out, and only puddles of water remain, and the blood is enough to stain them rustred.
Fatima nods grimly. She has put her headscarf on again to go outside, and she looks like the thirty-something doctor she is, not the schoolgirl of last night.
‘Very dead.’
‘Is it – was it …’ I trail off, not sure how to put it, but my eyes go to Shadow. There is blood on his muzzle, and he whines again as a fly settles on it, and he shivers it off and then licks at the stickiness with his long pink tongue.
Kate shrugs. Her face is grim.
‘I don’t know. I can’t believe it – he’s never harmed a fly, but he is … well, capable. He’s strong enough.’
‘But how?’ But even as the words leave my mouth, my gaze travels across the wooden walkway to the fenced-off section of shore that marks the entrance to the Mill. The gate is open. ‘Shit.’
‘Quite. I’d never have let him out if I’d realised.’
‘Oh God, Kate, I’m so sorry. Thea must have –’
‘Thea must have what?’ There’s a sleepy voice from behind us, and I turn to see Thea squinting in the bright sunlight, her hair tousled, an unlit Sobranie in her fingers.
Oh God.
‘Thea, I didn’t mean –’ I stop, shift uncomfortably, but it’s true, however my words sounded, I wasn’t trying to blame her, just work out how it happened. Then she sees the bloody mess of torn flesh and wool in front of us.
‘Fuck. What happened? What’s it got to do with me?’
‘Someone left the gate open,’ I say unhappily, ‘but I didn’t mean –’
‘It doesn’t matter who left the gate open,’ Kate breaks in sharply. ‘It was my fault for not checking it was closed before I put Shadow out.’
‘Your dog did that?’ Thea’s face is pale, and she takes an involuntary step back, away from Shadow, and his bloodied muzzle. ‘Oh my God.’
‘We don’t know that,’ Kate says, very terse. But Fatima’s face is worried, and I know she is thinking the same thing I am; if not Shadow, then who?
‘Come on,’ Kate says at last, and she turns, a cloud of flies rising up from the dead sheep’s guts, splattered across the wooden jetty, and then settling back to their feast once more. ‘Let’s get inside, I’ll phone round the farmers, find out who’s lost a ewe. Fuck. This is the last thing we need.’
And I know what she means. It’s not just the sheep, coming as it does on top of our hangovers and too little sleep, it’s everything. It’s the smell in the air. The water lapping at our feet, that is no longer a friend, but polluted with blood. The feeling of death closing in on the Mill.
It takes four or five calls for Kate to find the farmer who owns the sheep, and then we wait, sipping coffee, and trying to ignore the buzzing of the flies outside the closed shore door. Thea has gone back to bed, and Fatima and I distract ourselves with Freya, cutting up toast for her to play with, although she doesn’t really eat, just gums it.
Kate paces the room, restlessly, like a caged tiger, walking from the windows overlooking the Reach, to the foot of the stairs, and then back, again and again. She is smoking, the rippling smoke from the roll-up the only sign of fingers that are shaking a little.
Suddenly her head goes up, for all the world like a dog herself, and a moment later I hear what she already did: the sound of tyres in the lane. Kate turns abruptly and goes outside, shutting the door of the Mill behind her. Through the wood I hear voices, one deep and full of frustration, the other Kate’s, low and apologetic.
‘I’m sorry,’ I hear, and then, ‘… the police?’
‘Do you think we should go out?’ Fatima asks uneasily.
‘I don’t know.’ I find I am twisting my fingers in the hem of my dressing gown. ‘He doesn’t sound exactly angry … do you think we should let Kate handle it?’
Fatima is holding Freya, so I get up and move to the shore window. I can see Kate and the farmer standing close together, their heads bent over the dead shee
p. He seems to be more sad than angry, and Kate puts her arm around his shoulder for a brief moment, clasping him in a gesture of comfort that’s not quite a hug, but near it.
The farmer says something I don’t catch, and Kate nods, then together they reach down and pick the ewe up by the fore and hind legs, carrying the poor thing over the rickety bridge, and swinging the body unceremoniously into the back of the farmer’s pickup.
‘Let me get my wallet,’ I hear Kate say, as the farmer latches up the tailgate, and when she turns back towards the house, I see something small and bloody in her fingers, something that she shoves into the pocket of her jacket before she reaches the house.
I step hastily back from the window as the door opens, and Kate comes into the room, shaking her head like someone trying to rid themselves of an unpleasant memory.
‘Is it OK?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know,’ Kate says. ‘I think so.’ She rinses her bloody hands under the tap, and then goes to the dresser for her wallet, but when she looks inside at the notes section, her face falls. ‘Fuck.’
‘Do you need cash?’ Fatima says quickly. She gets up, hands Freya to me. ‘I’ve got my purse upstairs.’
‘I have cash too,’ I say, eager to finally do something that could help. ‘How much do you need?’
‘Two hundred, I think,’ Kate says soberly. ‘It’s more than the sheep’s worth, but he’d be within his rights to get the police involved, and I really don’t want that.’
I nod, and then turn to see Fatima coming back down the stairs with her handbag.
‘I’ve got a hundred and fifty,’ she says. ‘I remembered Salten never had a cash machine so I drew some out at the petrol station on the way through Hampton’s Lee.’
‘Let me go halves.’ I stand, holding a wriggling Freya over my shoulder, and dig into the handbag I left hanging on the stair post. Inside is my wallet, fat with notes. ‘I’ve definitely got enough, hang on …’ I count it out, five crisp twenties, hampered by Freya joyfully snatching at each as they go past. Fatima adds a hundred of her own on top. Kate gives a quick, rueful smile.
