by Ruth Ware
“I’ll be in meetings all day, but I’ll call before bedtime,” Sandra said, her voice slightly softer now. “I’m sorry I didn’t manage to speak to the girls before bed, but we were having dinner with a client. And anyway, it probably would have unsettled them. I find it’s better to be out of sight, out of mind at first.”
“Yes,” I said. “Sure. I can appreciate that.”
“Well, good night, Rowan. Sleep tight. I’m sure you will; you’ll have an early start tomorrow, I’m afraid!”
She gave another laugh. I made myself echo it, though in truth I was feeling anything but amused. The idea of starting all this all over again at 6:00 a.m. was giving me a kind of sick feeling. How had I ever thought I could do this?
Remember why you’re here, I thought grimly.
“Yes, I’m sure I will,” I said, trying to infuse a smile into my voice. “Good night, Sandra.”
I waited—but there was no click, or any sign that she had hung up, or closed the app.
“S-Sandra?” I said uncertainly, but she seemed to be gone. I slumped back in my chair, and ran my hand over my face. I felt exhausted.
“I should be going,” Jack said awkwardly, evidently taking my gesture as a hint. He stood, pushing back his chair. “It’s late, and you’ve an early start, I’d imagine, with the girls tomorrow.”
“No, stay,” I looked up at him, suddenly desperate not to be left alone in this house of hidden eyes and ears and speakers. The company of a person—a real, flesh-and-blood person, not a disembodied voice, was irresistible. “Please. I’d rather have someone to eat with.” A whiff of something burning came from the oven, and I suddenly remembered the pizza. “Have you eaten?”
“No, but I won’t take your supper.”
“Of course you will. I put a pizza in the oven just before you arrived. It’s probably burnt by now, but it’s huge. I won’t manage it all myself. Please, give me a hand, honestly, I want you to.”
“Well . . .” He glanced at the utility room door, towards the garage, and, I assumed, his little flat above, its windows dark. “Well . . . if you insist.”
“I do.” I put on oven gloves and opened the door of the hot oven. The pizza was done. Overdone, in fact, the cheese crisping and charred around the edges, but I was too hungry to care. “Sorry, it’s a bit blackened. I completely forgot about it. Do you mind?”
“Not at all. I’m hungry enough to eat a horse, let alone a slightly burnt pizza.” He grinned, the tanned skin of his cheeks crinkling.
“And I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I need a glass of wine. You?”
“I wouldn’t say no.”
He watched as I chopped the pizza into slices and found two glasses in the cupboard.
“Are you okay with eating off the board?” I asked, and he gave another of his wide grins.
“I’m more than okay. It’s you who’s taking the risk. I’ll gobble all your dinner if it’s not safely ring-fenced, but if you’re fine with that, it’s not my lookout.”
“I’m more than okay too,” I said, and to my surprise, I found myself returning his grin with a slightly shy smile of my own, but a real one, not the forced, watery attempt of earlier tonight.
There was silence for a few minutes as we both worked our way through a greasy, delicious slice each, and then another. At last Jack picked up his third and spoke, balancing it on his fingertips, angling the slice so that the grease dripped back onto the board.
“So . . . about what you were asking earlier.”
“The . . . the supernatural thing?”
“Aye. Well, the truth is, I’ve not seen anything myself, but Jean, she’s . . . well, not superstitious exactly. But she loves a good yarn. She’s always filling the kids’ heads with folk tales—you know, selkies and kelpies, that sort of thing. And this house is very old, or parts of it are, anyway. There’s been the usual amount of deaths and violence, I suppose.”
“So . . . you think Jean’s been telling the girls stuff and they’ve been passing it on to the nannies?”
“Maybe. I wouldn’t want to say for sure either way. But, look, those other nannies were very young, most of them, at least. It’s not everyone who’s cut out to live in a place like this, miles away from a town or a bar or a pub. Au pairs, they don’t want to be here, they want to be in Edinburgh or Glasgow, where there’s nightclubs and other people who speak their own language, you ken?”
“Yeah.” I looked out of the window. It was too dark to see anything, but in my mind’s eye I saw the road, stretching away into darkness, the miles and miles of rolling hills, the mountains in the distance. There was silence apart from the rain. Not a car, not a passerby, nothing. “Yeah, I can understand that.”
We sat in silence for a moment. I don’t know what Jack was thinking, but I was filled with a mix of strange emotions—stress, tiredness, trepidation at the thought of the days stretched out ahead of me, and something else, even more unsettling. Something that was more about Jack, and his presence, and the scatter of freckles across his broad cheekbones, and the way his muscles moved beneath the skin of his forearm as he folded the final pizza slice into a neat parcel and finished it off in two quick bites.
“Well, I’d best be away to my bed.” He stood, stretching so that I heard his joints click. “Thanks for the meal, it was nice to have someone to talk to.”
“Same.”
I stood, suddenly self-conscious, as if he had been reading my thoughts.
“You’ll be all right?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Well, I’m just over the garage, in the old stable block if you need anything. It’s the door around the side, the one painted green with a swallow on the plate. If anything happens in the night—”
“What would happen?” I broke in, surprised, and he gave a laugh.
“That came out wrong. I just meant, if you need me for anything, you know where I am. Did Sandra give you my mobile?”
“No.”
He pulled a leaflet off the fridge and scribbled his number in the margin, then handed it to me.
“There you go. Just in case, like.”
Just in case, what? I wanted to ask again, but I knew he would only laugh it off.
His gesture had been meant as a reassuring one, I was sure of it. But somehow it had left me feeling anything but.
“Well, thanks Jack,” I said, feeling a little awkward, and he grinned again, shrugged himself into his wet coat, and then opened the utility room door and ducked out into the rain.
* * *
After he had gone I made my way into the utility room myself to lock up. The house felt very still and quiet somehow, without his presence, and I sighed as I reached above the top of the doorframe for the key. But it wasn’t there.
I patted my way along the doorframe, feeling with my fingertips among the dust and little crunching lumps of dead insect, but there was nothing there.
It wasn’t on the floor either.
Could Jean have moved it? Or knocked it down while dusting?
Except, I had a crystal clear memory of putting the key up there after Jean left, just as Sandra had instructed, to keep it handy in case of an emergency but out of reach of the children. Could it have fallen down? But if so, what had happened to it? It was large and brass. Too big to go unnoticed on the floor, or to fit up a Hoover pipe. Had it got kicked under something?
I got down on my hands and knees and shone my phone’s torch under the washing machine and tumble dryer, but could see nothing under either, just flat white tiles and a few dust bunnies that quivered when I blew them aside. It wasn’t behind the mop bucket either. Then, in spite of my doubts, I went to the cupboard where the downstairs Hoover lived—but the dust chamber had been emptied. There was nothing in there. It was the bagless kind with a clear plastic cylinder that you could see the dust circulating in—even setting aside the question of whether the key could have got inside, there was no way anyone could have tipped out a big brass key without noticin
g it.
After that I scoured the kitchen, and even checked the bin—but there was nothing there.
At last I opened the utility room door and stared out into the rain towards the stable block, where a light had come on in the upstairs window. Should I call Jack? Would he have a spare key? But if he did, could I really bear for him to think me so disorganized and helpless that I had waited only ten minutes before taking up his offer of help?
As I was wavering, the light in his window went out, and I realized he had probably gone to bed.
It was too late. I wasn’t going to drag him out in his nightclothes.
After a last glance around at the yard directly outside the door, in case the key had got kicked outside somehow, I shut the door.
I’d ask Jack in the morning.
In the meantime, oh God, what would I do? I’d . . . I’d have to barricade the door with something. It was absurd—we were miles away from anywhere, behind locked gates, but I knew I wouldn’t sleep well if I felt the place was insecure.
The handle was a knob, not the kind you could put a chair under to stop it from turning, and there was no bolt, but at last, after a lot of searching, I found a wedge-shaped door stopper in the Hoover cupboard. I rammed it firmly into the gap beneath the door and then turned the doorknob to test it.
Somewhat to my surprise, it held. It wouldn’t stop a determined burglar—but then very little would. If someone was really set on breaking in they could just smash a window. But at the very least, it did give the impression that the door was locked, and I knew I would sleep more soundly because of it.
When I went back into the kitchen to clear away the pizza box and our plates, the clock above the stove read 11:36, and I could not suppress a groan. The girls would be up at six. I should have been in bed hours ago.
Well, it was too late to undo that. I’d just have to forgo a shower and get to sleep as quickly as possible. I was so tired, I was pretty sure that wouldn’t be a problem, anyway.
“Lights off,” I said aloud.
The room was instantly plunged into blackness, just the faint glow from the hallway illuminating the concrete floor. Smothering a yawn, I made my way up the stairs to bed, and was asleep almost before I had undressed.
When I woke, it was with a start, to complete darkness, and a sense of total disorientation. Where was I? What had woken me?
It took a minute for the memory to come back—Heatherbrae House. The Elincourts. The children. Jack.
My phone on the bedside table said it was 3:16 a.m., and I groaned and let it fall back to the wood with a clunk. No wonder it was still dark, it was the middle of the fucking night.
Stupid brain.
But what the hell had woken me? Was it Petra? Had one of the girls cried out in their sleep?
I lay for a moment, listening. I could hear nothing, but I was a floor away, and there were two closed doors between me and the children.
At last, suppressing a sigh, I got up, wrapped my dressing gown around myself, and went out onto the landing.
The house was quiet. But something felt . . . wrong, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. The rain had stopped, and I could hear nothing at all, not even the far-off roar of a car, or the whisper of wind in the trees.
When the realization came, it was in the shape of two things. The first was the shadow on the wall in front of me, the shadow cast by the wilting peonies on the table downstairs.
Someone had turned the hall lights on downstairs. Lights that I was sure I had not left on when I went to bed.
The second came as I began to tiptoe down the stairs, and it made my heart almost stop and then begin beating hard enough to leap out of my chest.
It was the sound of footsteps on a wooden floor, slow and deliberate, exactly like the other night.
Creak. Creak. Creak.
My chest felt like it was constricted by an iron band. I froze, two steps down, looking at the light on the landing below, and then up at where the noise seemed to be coming from. Jesus Christ. Was someone in the house?
The light I could have understood. Perhaps Maddie or Ellie had got up to use the loo and left it on—there were dim little night-lights plugged into the wall at intervals, but they would probably have switched on the main hallway light anyway.
But the footsteps . . . ?
I thought of Sandra’s voice, suddenly coming without warning over the sound system in the kitchen. Could that be the answer? The bloody Happy app? But how? More important, why? It didn’t make sense. The only people with access to the app were Sandra and Bill, and they had no possible motivation to scare me like this. Quite the reverse, in fact. They had just gone to enormous trouble and expense to recruit me.
Besides, it just didn’t sound like it was coming from the speakers. There was no sense of a disembodied noise, the way there had been with Sandra’s voice in the kitchen. There, I’d had no impression of someone standing behind me, talking to me. It had sounded exactly like what it was—someone being broadcast through speakers. This, though, was different. I could hear the footsteps start on one side of the ceiling and move slowly and implacably to the other. Then they paused, and reversed. It sounded . . . well . . . as if there was someone pacing in the room above my head. But that made no sense either. Because there was no room up there. There was not so much as a loft hatch.
An image suddenly flashed into my head—something I hadn’t thought of since the day I arrived. The locked door in my room. Where did it lead to? Was there an attic? It seemed improbable that someone could have entered through my room, but I could hear the footsteps from above.
Shivering, I tiptoed back into my own room and flicked the switch on the lamp by my bed. It didn’t turn on.
I swore, Mr. Wrexham. I’m not too proud to admit it. I swore, long and loud. I had turned that light off by the switch, so why the fuck wouldn’t it turn back on by the switch? What kind of sense did this stupid lighting system make anyway?
Furiously, not caring about the music or the heating system or anything else, I mashed my hand against the featureless panel on the wall, bashing randomly at the squares and dials as they illuminated beneath my palm. Lights flickered on and off in closets, the bathroom fan came on, a brief burst of classical music filled the air and then fell silent as I jabbed at the panel again, and some unseen vent in the ceiling suddenly began to blow out cold air. But finally, the main overhead light came on.
I let my hand fall to my side, breathing heavily but triumphant. Then I set about trying to open the locked door.
First I tried the key to my bedroom door, which Sandra had shown me, tucked away on the doorframe above the door, like the others. It didn’t fit.
Then, I tried the key to the wardrobe on the other side. It didn’t fit either.
There was nothing above the doorframe except a little dust.
Finally, I resorted to kneeling down and peering through the keyhole, my heart like a drum in my breast, beating so hard I thought I might be sick.
I could see nothing at all—just unending blackness. But I could feel something. A cool breeze that made me blink and draw back from the keyhole, my eye watering.
It was not just a cupboard inside that space. Something else was there. An attic, perhaps. At the very least, a space big enough to have a draft and a source of air.
The footsteps had stopped, but I knew that I would not sleep again tonight, and at last I wrapped my duvet around myself and sat, my phone in my hand, the overhead light blazing down on me, watching the locked door.
I don’t know what I was expecting. To see the handle turn? For someone—something—to emerge?
Whatever it was, it didn’t happen. I just sat there, as the sky outside my window began to lighten and a thin lemon-yellow streak of dawn crept across the carpet, mixing with the artificial light from above.
I felt nauseous with a mix of fear and tiredness, and dread of the day ahead.
At last, when I heard a low fractious wail come from downstairs, I l
oosened my grip on my phone, flexed my stiff fingers, and saw that the display said 5:57 a.m.
It was morning. The children were waking up.
As I crawled from my bed, my hand went up involuntarily to touch my necklace—but my fingers grazed only my collarbone, and I remembered that I had taken it off that first night, spooling it on the bedside table, just as I had done before the interview.
Now, I turned to pick it up, and it wasn’t there. I frowned and looked down the back of the little nightstand. Nothing. Had Jean McKenzie tidied it away?
The wail from downstairs came again, louder this time, and I sighed and abandoned the hunt. I would look for it later.
But first I had to get through another day.
* * *
Coffeemaker—preloaded with beans and connected to mains water. Operated via the app, select “Appliances” from the menu, then “Baristo” and then choose from the preprogrammed selections or customize your own. If beans logo shows, the hopper needs to be refilled. If the ! error logo shows then there is either a Wi-Fi issue, or a problem with the water pressure. You can program it to dispense at a particular time every day, which is great for mornings, but of course you must not forget to put a cup underneath it the night before! The preprogrammed selections are as follows—
Jesus. I had confined myself mostly to tea since getting here, mainly because the coffeemaker was so extremely intimidating—a chrome beast of a thing covered with buttons and knobs and dials. Sandra had explained when I arrived that it was Wi-Fi enabled, and app-operated—but Happy was proving to be the least intuitive system I had ever encountered. However, after my sleepless night, I had decided that a cup of coffee was the only thing that was going to make me feel halfway normal, and while Petra chewed her way through a dish of mini rice cakes, I had resolved to try to figure it out.
I hadn’t even switched it on when a voice behind me said, “Knock, knock . . .”
I jumped and swung round, my nerves still jangling with the traces of last night’s stale fear.
It was Jack, standing in the open doorway to the utility room, jacket on and dog leashes in hand. I had not heard him come in, and evidently my shock and ambivalence must have shown in my face.
