The Turn of the Key

by Ruth Ware

  We even looked alike.

  When she looked at me, with that touch of triumph in her dark, boot-button eyes, I had recognized something else too, and now I knew what it was. It was a flash of myself in those eyes. A flicker of my own dark brown eyes, and my own determination. Maddie was a woman with a plan, just like I was. The question was, what was it?

  I was so tired after my near sleepless night the night before that I bundled the girls upstairs to bed ridiculously early. To my surprise they didn’t protest, and I found myself wondering if they were as tired as I was.

  Petra went down with no more than a token protest, and when I went to check on Maddie and Ellie they were both in their pajamas—or almost there, in the case of Ellie. I helped her figure out which way her top went and then shepherded them into the bathroom, where they did their teeth obediently as I stood over them.

  “Do you want a story?” I asked as I tucked them into their little beds, and I saw Ellie’s eyes flicker to Maddie, looking for permission to speak. But Maddie shook her head.

  “No. We’re too big for stories.”

  “I know that’s not true,” I said, with a little laugh. “Everyone likes bedtime stories.”

  Any other night I might have sat myself down, cracked open a book, and begun anyway, in defiance of Maddie’s refusals. But I was tired. I was so tired. Being with the girls all day from sunup to sunset was exhausting in a completely different way to the nursery, a way I hadn’t fully anticipated or understood until now. I thought of all the mums who had dropped their children off talking about how exhausted they were, and the slight contempt I’d felt for them when all they had to deal with was one or two at the most, but now I realized what they’d been talking about. It wasn’t as physical as the work at the nursery, or as intense, but it was the way it stretched, endlessly, the way the needing never stopped, and there was never a moment when you could hand them over to your colleague and run away for a quick fag break to just be yourself.

  I was never off duty here. Or at least, not for the foreseeable future.

  “I tell you what,” I said at last, seeing Ellie’s chin wobble. “How about I put on an audiobook?”

  Pulling out my phone, I managed to navigate to the Happy media system, and then to the audio files, where I scrolled through the list of titles. The organization was confusing—there didn’t seem to be any distinction between the different file types, and Mozart was listed alongside Moana, Thelonious Monk, and L. M. Montgomery—but as I scrolled, I felt a little warm head thrust up under my arm, and Ellie’s small hand took the phone.

  “I can show you,” she said, and pressed an icon that looked like a stylized panda bear, and then another icon that looked like a flattened out v, but which I realized, as Ellie pressed it, must be supposed to indicate books.

  A list of children’s audiobooks flashed up.

  “Do you know which one you want?” I asked, but she shook her head, and scanning the list, I selected one at random—The Sheep Pig by Dick King-Smith, which seemed perfect. Long, calming, and nice and wholesome. I pressed play, selected “Girls’ bedroom” from the list of speakers, and waited for the first notes of the introductory music to come out of the speakers. Then I tucked Ellie in.

  “Do you want a kiss?” I said. She didn’t reply, but I thought I saw a little nod, and I bent and swiftly kissed her baby-soft cheek before she could change her mind.

  Next, I went across to Maddie. She was lying there with her eyes tightly shut, though I could see her pupils moving beneath the paper thinness of her lids, and I could tell from her breathing she was nowhere near asleep.

  “Do you want a good-night kiss, Maddie?” I asked, knowing what the answer would be, but wanting to be fair.

  She said nothing. I stood for a moment, listening to her breathing, and then said, “Good night, girls. Sweet dreams, and sleep well for school tomorrow,” and then I left, shutting the door behind me.

  Out in the hallway I breathed a tremulous, almost incredulous sigh of relief.

  Could it be true? Were they really all safely in bed, washed, brushed, and no one screaming? It seemed, compared to last night, anyway, deceptively easy.

  But perhaps . . . perhaps I had turned a corner with them. Perhaps that first angry protest was just shock at being away from their mum, with a comparative stranger in charge. Maybe a nice day together and a phone call from Sandra was all it had taken?

  My heart softened as I checked the lock on the utility room door, did battle with the front-door panel and the lights in the hall, and then climbed the flights of stairs to my own room with a weariness I was having increasing trouble overcoming.

  I was passing Bill and Sandra’s room when I thought I heard something. Or perhaps saw it—it was hard to know. A little flicker of movement in the sliver of darkness between the door and the frame. Was it just my imagination? I was so tired. It could be my mind playing tricks on me.

  Very, very quietly, not wanting to disturb the girls, I pushed the door with the flat of my hand, listening to it shushing across the thick silver carpet.

  Inside, the room was quite empty and still. The curtains were undrawn, and though in London it would have been getting dark, here we were so far north that the sun was only just sliding behind the mountains. Livid squares of reddish light slanted obliquely across the floor, turning the carpet into a kind of fiery chessboard, though the corners of the room were in deep, impenetrable shadow. I let my hand slip over the thick, crisp cotton of their duvet cover as I passed their bed, glancing into the shadows, feeling my pulse quicken with the audacity of this intrusion. If Sandra were watching through the monitor now, what would she see? Someone prowling around her bedroom, fingering her bed linen. I thought I heard a noise . . . I practiced the excuse in my head, but I knew it was no longer true. I had been looking for an excuse.

  There was a pair of earrings on the bedside table closest to the door. This must be Sandra’s side. Which meant that Bill slept . . .

  I tiptoed around the bed, keeping to the shadows as far as I could. I knew from peering at Maddie and Ellie’s bedroom monitor that the resolution of the images in darkness was not good. It was very hard to make out anything beyond the little pool of warm light cast by the night-light, and in here the contrast between the squares of sunset and the deep shadow in the rest of the room was even greater.

  Very, very quietly, I slid open Bill’s bedside table drawer, and looked down at the tumble of personal possessions inside. A watch with a broken strap. A slew of loose change. A few tickets, a hay-fever spray, a comb. I’m not sure what I had been hoping for—but if it was to get a sense of the person who lived here, slept here, laid his head on the crisp white pillow, I was disappointed. It was strikingly impersonal.

  I thought of that meeting in the kitchen, of his denimed leg slipping between my thighs with a confident intrusiveness born of long practice, and I felt sick. Who are you?

  Suddenly I had to get out, and I hurried across the checkered carpet, no longer caring about keeping to the shadows, or whether Sandra or Bill saw me. Let them see. Both of them.

  Up in my room, I closed the door with a feeling of barricading myself away from the rest of the house. As the curtains drew themselves robotically over the windowpane, my last glimpse of the outside world was of the bloody streaks of sunset fading behind the far-off peaks of the Cairngorms, and of a light in Jack’s window shining steadfastly across the darkening courtyard.

  I thought of him, as I let my head sink into the goose-feather softness of the pillow. I thought of his hands that morning, the ease with which he restrained the two excited dogs, the way he dominated them, keeping them at heel. And I thought of the key, and how he had gone unerringly to the place where it had been hidden, a place I had already checked.

  But then I remembered other things—his kindness that first night, in coming to check on me. And his voice over the baby monitor, putting Petra to sleep, crooning to her with a gentleness that made my stomach clench in a strange
way I could not pin down. There had been no deception there. No pretense. That gentleness was real, I was certain of it.

  And I wondered, if it had been him in the kitchen that night, instead of Bill, would I have lurched queasily from the room with panicked disgust? Or would I have reacted very differently? Opened my legs to his, perhaps. Leaned forward. Blushed.

  But even as the thought came to me, making my cheeks flush in the darkness, I remembered again, kneeling on the floor of the utility room, sweeping my phone torch beneath that washing machine. That key had not been there. The intervening hours had not made me doubt that fact anymore—quite the reverse. I was totally sure now.

  Which meant . . .

  I rubbed my hands over my face, resisting the urge to scratch the fading itch left by the creeper. I was being absurd. There was no earthly reason why he would steal that key simply to unnerve me. He had his own set, after all, and his thumbprint was authorized for use on the front door. (Though . . . there was probably a record every time someone used that lock, my subconscious whispered. A record that wouldn’t exist with an old-fashioned lock and key.)

  But no. No. It made no sense. Why would he go to the trouble of making a key disappear for a few hours? What would he gain from it? Nothing, except to put me on my guard. And there was my necklace too—my necklace, which I had still not found, though I’d not had time to look properly. That could not have been Jack, surely. This was paranoia, all of it. Things get lost all the time. Keys fall down. Necklaces get tidied away into pockets and drawers, and unearthed days later. There would be a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this—one that did not require a conspiracy theory.

  I pushed the thought down as I rolled over and let sleep cover me like a heavy blanket.

  My last thought, as sleep claimed me, was not of Jack, nor of the key, nor even of Bill. It was of the footsteps in the attic.

  And the old man who had lost his daughter to his poison garden.

  There was another little girl.

  My hand went vainly to my throat, trying to hold a necklace that wasn’t there. And then at last I slept.

  I woke to the sound of screams and a confusion so loud that my first instinct was to clap my hands over my ears, even as I bolted upright in my bed, staring wildly around, shivering with cold.

  The lights were on—all of them, turned up to their brightest, most eye-searing maximum. And the room was icy-cold. But the noise—Jesus, the noise.

  It was music, or at least I supposed so. But so loud and distorted that the tune was unrecognizable, the howling and squealing coming from the speakers in the ceiling turning it into a formless din.

  For a minute I couldn’t think what the hell to do. Then I ran to the panel on the wall and began pushing buttons, my pulse pounding in my ears, the screeching misshapen music like a howl in my head. Nothing happened except that the lights in the closets turned on to join the rest.

  “Music off!” I shouted. “Speakers off! Volume down!”

  Nothing, nothing.

  From downstairs I could hear furious barking, and terrified steam-train shrieks coming from Petra’s room, and at last, abandoning my attempts with the panel, I grabbed my dressing gown and fled.

  The music was just as loud outside the children’s rooms—louder even, for the narrow walls of the hallway seemed to funnel it. And the lights were on down here too, showing me a glimpse of Petra through the nursery doorway, standing up in her cot, her hair tousled on end, screaming in fear.

  I snatched her up and ran to the girls’ room at the end of the corridor, shoving the door open to find Maddie curled in a fetal position in her bed, her hands over her ears, and Ellie nowhere to be seen.

  “Where’s Ellie?” I bellowed, above the noise of the music, and Petra’s fire-engine wails. Maddie looked up, her face blank with fear, her hands still clapped over her ears, and I grabbed her wrist and hauled her to her feet.

  “Where’s Ellie?” I yelled, directly into her face, and she pulled away and fled down the stairs, with me following.

  In the entrance hall the noise was just as bad, and there, in the middle of the Persian rug at the foot of the stairs, was Ellie. She was crouched into a little ball, her arms wrapped around her head. All about her leapt the terrified dogs, released from their beds in the utility room, adding their frantic barks to the cacophony.

  “Ellie!” I shouted. “What happened? Did you press something?”

  She looked up at me, blank and uncomprehending, and I shook my head and then ran over to the tablet sitting on the metal breakfast bar. I opened up the home-management app, but when I tapped in my access code, nothing happened. Had I misremembered it? I tapped it in again, the dogs’ furious woofs like a jackhammer of sound against my skull. Still nothing. You are locked— I had time to read, before the screen lit up momentarily and then died—a red battery warning flashing for an instant before it went black. Fuck.

  I slammed my hand onto the wall panel and the lights above the cooker turned on and a screen on the fridge began blasting out YouTube, but the music volume didn’t reduce. I could feel my heart thumping wildly in my chest, growing more and more panicked as I realized I had no way of turning this thing off. What a stupid fucking idea—a smart house? This was the least smart thing I could imagine.

  The children were shivering now, Petra still letting out earsplitting shrieks of distress next to my ear as the dogs ran in circles around us, and I tried the power button on the tablet, more helplessly, not expecting the thing to work, and it didn’t. The screen was completely dark. My phone was upstairs—but could I leave the terrified children long enough to fetch it?

  I was staring round, wondering what on earth I was going to do, when I felt a touch on my shoulder. I jumped so wildly I almost dropped Petra, and swung round accusingly to find Jack Grant, standing so close behind me that my shoulder touched his bare chest as I turned. We both took an involuntary step back, me nearly tripping over a stool.

  He was naked from the waist up and had plainly been asleep, judging by his rumpled hair, and he bellowed something, pointing at the door, but I shook my head, and he came close, cupping his hands around my ear.

  “What’s happening? I could hear the din from the stables.”

  “I have no idea!” I yelled back. “I was asleep—maybe one of the girls touched something—I can’t get it to turn off.”

  “Can I try?” he shouted, and I felt like laughing in his face. Could he? I would kiss him if he succeeded. I shoved the tablet at him, almost aggressively.

  “Be my guest!”

  He tried to turn the tablet on and then realized, as I had, that it was out of power. Then he went to the utility room and opened up a cupboard there, the one where the Wi-Fi router was kept, along with the electricity meter. I’m not completely sure what he did in there, I was too busy comforting an increasingly distraught Petra, but all of a sudden everything went pitch-black, and the sound stopped with an abruptness that was disorienting. I found my ears were ringing with the aftermath.

  In the silence, I could hear Ellie’s panicked gasping sobs and Maddie rocking back and forth.

  Petra, in my arms, stopped crying, and I felt her little body go stiff with surprise. Then she let out a gurgling laugh.

  “Night night!” she said.

  Then there was a click, and the lights came back on—less brightly this time, and fewer of them.

  “There,” Jack said. He came back through, wiping his forehead, the dogs padding in his wake, suddenly calm again. “It’s gone back to default settings now. Bloody hell. Okay.”

  There was sweat on his forehead in spite of the chill in the air, and when he sat down at the kitchen counter, the tablet in his hands, I could see his hands were shaking.

  Mine, as I set Petra beside Maddie, were trembling too.

  Jack plugged the tablet in and now he put it down to wait until it had enough charge to turn on.

  “Th-thank you,” I said shakily. Ellie was still sobbing in the hallw
ay. “Ellie, there’s no need to cry, sweetie. It’s okay now. Look . . . um . . .” I crossed the kitchen and began rummaging in the cupboards. “Look . . . here we are, have a jammie dodger. You too, Maddie.”

  “We’ve brushed our teeth,” Maddie said blankly, and I suppressed a hysterical laugh. Fuck teeth, was what I wanted to say, but I managed to bite it back.

  “I think just this once, it’ll be okay. We’ve all had a shock. Sugar is good for shock.”

  “Aye, it’s true,” Jack said, rather solemnly. “Back in the old day they’d make you drink sweet tea, but since I don’t really like sugar in my tea, I’ll have a jammie dodger too, thanks, Rowan.”

  “See?” I handed one to Jack and bit into one myself. “It’s fine.” I spoke around the crumbs. “Here you go, Maddie.”

  She took it, warily, and then shoved it in her own mouth as if I were about to take it away again.

  Ellie ate hers more slowly.

  “Mine!” Petra shouted, holding up her arms. I gave a mental shrug. I wasn’t going to win any prizes for child nutrition, but I no longer gave a fuck about that. Breaking one in half, I gave her a piece of biscuit too, and then threw a chunk to each of the dogs for good measure.

  “Okay, we’re up and running again,” Jack said, as Petra began joyfully stuffing the biscuit into her mouth. For a minute I didn’t realize what he meant, and then I saw that he was holding the tablet, the screen casting a glow onto his face. “I’ve got the app open. Try your PIN first.”

  I took the tablet from him, selected my username from the little drop-down menu, and put in the PIN Sandra had given me for the home-management app.

  You are locked out, flashed up on the screen, and then when I tapped the little i button next to the message, Sorry, you have entered your Happy number incorrectly too many times and are now locked out. Please enter an admin password to override this, or wait 4 hours.