The Turn of the Key

by Ruth Ware

  I was just strapping Petra back into her car seat when my phone pinged, and I glanced at it, wondering if it was something important. It was an email. From Sandra.

  Oh shit.

  Paranoid thoughts flitted through my mind—had she seen the camera footage of me almost hitting Maddie, or the endless stream of treats I had been bribing the girls with? Or was it something . . . else? Something Jean McKenzie had said?

  My stomach was fluttering butterflies as I clicked to open, but the subject header was matter of fact enough: Update. Whatever that meant.

  Hi, Rowan,

  Sorry to email but I’m in a meeting and can’t talk, and I wanted to send you a quick update with how things are going here. The trade fair has gone super well, but Bill has been called away to Dubai to do some troubleshooting out there, which means I’m going to have to take over on the Kensington project—not ideal as it means I will be away for a little longer than I had hoped, but it can’t be helped. I should be back by next Tuesday (i.e., a week today). Are you managing okay? Does that sound doable?

  In terms of the children, Rhiannon finishes school today. Elise’s mum has kindly volunteered to collect both girls (they live down near Pitlochry so have to drive past anyway) and Rhi will be back at Heatherbrae any time from about twelve onwards. I have texted her, so she knows what’s going on, and she’s excited to meet you.

  Jack spoke to Bill yesterday and mentioned that you are getting on very well with the girls; I’m very glad to hear it’s all going okay. Do call if you have any concerns—I will try to ring tonight before the girls’ bedtimes.

  Sandra x

  I shut down the email, unsure whether my overriding emotion was one of relief, or trepidation. I most definitely was relieved—not least about the fact that Jack had apparently put in a good word for me. But another week . . . I had not realized until I read Sandra’s words how much I had been counting on her arrival back this Friday, ticking off the days in my head like a prison sentence.

  And now . . . four more days added onto my term. And not just with the little ones, but with Rhiannon too. How did I feel about that?

  The idea of having someone else in the house was undeniably comforting. There was something absurd about the memory of those slow, measured footsteps, but even in daylight, I could feel the hairs beginning to rise up on my arms as I recalled lying there, listening to them pacing back and forth. Having someone, even a stroppy fourteen-year-old, in the next bedroom would definitely take the edge off.

  But as I started up the Tesla, the image that flashed through my head was a different one—that scarlet scrawl across the bedroom door: FUCK OFF, KEEP OUT OR YOU DIE. There was something there. Something very close to Maddie’s furious, wordless anger.

  Perhaps, whatever it was, I would be able to get to the bottom of it with Rhiannon.

  The school run back to Heatherbrae took longer than the previous morning, because there was a van on the road ahead of me. I followed it slowly from Carn Bridge, tapping gingerly at the accelerator, sure that it would turn off at every junction we came to, but inexplicably it seemed to be going the same way, even as the road narrowed and grew more rural. It was with some relief that I realized we were nearly at the turn off to Heatherbrae House, and I was just about to signal left when the van signaled too, and drew up over the drive, forcing me to stamp on the brakes.

  As I waited, the Tesla silently idling, the passenger door opened and a girl jumped out, a rucksack on her shoulder. She said something to the driver, and the back door of the van popped open. She dragged a huge case out, thumping it carelessly onto the gravel, and then slammed the door and stepped back as the driver pulled away from the curb. I was just about to lean out and ask her who she was and what she was doing in the middle of nowhere when she pulled her phone out of her pocket and held it up to the proximity sensor of the gates, and they swung open.

  It couldn’t be Rhiannon, surely—she wasn’t due back until the afternoon, and that disreputable van certainly didn’t look like it belonged to anyone’s mother. Was it someone who worked here? But in that case, why the huge trunk?

  I waited a few minutes for her to clear the gates, and then pressed on the accelerator. The Tesla slid smoothly up the drive, behind the girl, who turned, with a look of surprise on her face. However, instead of moving out of the way she stood her ground, hands on her hips, and the huge case at her feet. I braked again, feeling the gravel scrunch beneath the tires, and wound down the window.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I should be the one asking you that,” the girl said. She had long blond hair, and a clipped expensive accent, without a trace of Scots in it. “Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my parents’ car?”

  So it was Rhiannon.

  “Oh, hello, you must be Rhiannon. Sorry, I wasn’t expecting you back for another few hours. I’m Rowan.”

  The girl was still looking at me blankly, and I added, beginning to feel a little impatient, “The new nanny? I thought your mum told you.”

  It seemed stupid to be carrying on this conversation through a car window, so I put the car into park and got out, holding out my hand.

  “Nice to meet you. Sorry not to be expecting you, your mum said you wouldn’t be here until twelve.”

  “Rowan? But you’re—” the girl began, a furrow between her narrow brows; then something cleared and she shook her head. There was a smile on her lips, and it was not a very nice one. “Never mind.”

  “I’m what?” I dropped my hand.

  “I said, never mind,” Rhiannon said. “And don’t pay any attention to what my mum told you, she hasn’t got a fucking clue which way is up. As you may have already realized.” She looked me up and down, and then said, “Well, what are you waiting for?”

  “What?”

  “Give me a hand with my case.”

  I was getting more and more irritated, but there was no point in starting off on the wrong foot, so I swallowed my anger and wheeled the case around to the back of the Tesla. It was even heavier than it looked. Rhiannon didn’t wait for me to load it up, but climbed into the back seat, beside Petra.

  “Hello, brat,” she said, though there was an undertone of affection in her voice that had been notably absent when she spoke to me. And then, to me, as I slid into the driver’s seat, “Well, let’s not sit here all day admiring the view.”

  I gritted my teeth, swallowed my pride, and pressed down so hard on the accelerator that gravel spat from behind the wheels as we began to move up the drive towards Heatherbrae House.

  * * *

  Inside the house Rhiannon stalked into the kitchen, leaving me to unload both Petra and the huge heavy trunk. When I finally made it inside, Petra in tow, I saw that Rhiannon had already installed herself at the metal breakfast bar and was eating a giant sandwich she had clearly just put together.

  “Sooooo,” her voice came out like a drawl. “You’re Rowan, are you? I must say, you don’t look anything like what I was expecting.”

  I frowned. There was something a little malicious in her voice, and I wondered what exactly she meant.

  “What were you expecting?”

  “Oh . . . I don’t know. Just someone . . . different. You don’t look like a Rowan, somehow.” She grinned, and then before I could react, took another bite of sandwich and said, thickly, through the mouthful, “You need to put more mayonnaise on the fridge order. Oh, and where the hell are the dogs?”

  I blinked. I felt like it should be me asking the questions, grilling her. Why did I always seem to be on the wrong end of a power struggle? But it was a perfectly reasonable question, so I tried to keep my voice even as I answered it.

  “Jack was called away to take some paperwork to your dad. He took the dogs with him—he thought they’d enjoy the trip.”

  That hadn’t been what he’d said at all, but somehow I didn’t want to admit to this haughty teenager that I hadn’t felt equal to the task of wrangling three small children and two Labradors.


  “When’s he back?”

  “Jack? I don’t know. Today, I imagine.”

  Rhiannon nodded, chewing thoughtfully, and then said, around a mouthful of food, “By the way, it’s Elise’s birthday tonight and her mum’s invited me over for a sleepover. Is that okay?”

  There was something in her tone that made it clear that I was being asked only as a formality, but I nodded.

  “I’d better text your mum and check, but of course, that’s fine by me. Where does she live?”

  “Pitlochry. It’s about an hour’s drive, but Elise’s brother will give me a lift.”

  I nodded, pulled out my phone, and texted a quick message to Sandra.

  Rhiannon safely back—wants to go to a sleepover with Elise tonight. Assume that’s okay but please confirm.

  The message pinged back almost straightaway.

  No problem. Will call 6pm. Give my love to Rhi.

  “Your mum sends love and says it’s fine,” I reported back to Rhiannon, who rolled her eyes as if to say, Well, duh. “What time are you getting picked up?”

  “After lunch,” Rhiannon said. She swung her legs over the side of the stool and shoved the dirty plate across the counter, towards me. “Laters.”

  I watched her as she made her way up the stairs, long legs in school uniform stalking up the graceful curve of the staircase, and then disappearing around the bend.

  * * *

  She did not come down for lunch. I wasn’t particularly surprised, given the sandwich she’d eaten a couple of hours before, but since I was making lunch for me and Petra, I felt like should at least ask if she wanted to join us. I tried to speak to her using the intercom function, but it refused to connect. Instead, a message pinged back via the app. NOT HUNGRY. Huh. I hadn’t even known it could do that.

  OKAY, I messaged back. As I was putting my phone away, another thought occurred to me, and I pulled it back out of my pocket and reopened the Happy app. Feeling a little queasy, I clicked on the menu that showed the list of cameras available for me to access. As I scrolled down the list to R, I told myself I wouldn’t look, but at least that way I would know . . . but when I got down there, Rhiannon’s room was grayed out and unavailable, which was mostly a relief. There would have been something inexpressibly inappropriate about cameras in a fourteen-year-old girl’s bedroom.

  It was as I was spooning yogurt into Petra’s eager mouth, dodging her “helping” fingers as she tried to grab the spoon, that I heard footsteps on the stairs and peered into the hallway to see Rhiannon, holding a small bag in one hand and her phone in the other.

  “Elise’s brother’s here,” she said abruptly.

  “At the door?” I glanced automatically at my phone, puzzled. “I didn’t hear the bell.”

  “Duh. At the gates.”

  “Okay.” I resisted the urge to bite back a sarcastic retort. “I’ll buzz him in.”

  My phone was on the counter, but I’d barely even opened up the app, let alone navigated the menu of the various gates, doors, and garages I had access too, before Rhiannon was already halfway to the door.

  “No need.” She pressed her thumb to the panel and then swung open the front door. “He’s waiting for me down by the road.”

  “Wait.” I moved the yogurt out of Petra’s reach and then ran hastily after Rhiannon. “Hang on a sec, I need a number for Elise’s mum.”

  “Uh . . . why?” Rhiannon said, heavy with sarcasm, and I shook my head, refusing to get drawn into her defiance.

  “Because you’re fourteen years old, and I’ve never met the woman, and I just do. Do you have it? If not I’ll ask your mum.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got it.” She rolled her eyes, but pulled out her phone and then cast around for a bit of paper. One of Maddie’s drawings was lying on the stairs, and she picked it up and scribbled a number on the back. “There. Happy?”

  “Yes,” I said, though it was not entirely true. She slammed the door behind her, and I watched through the window as she disappeared around the curve in the drive, and then I looked down at the piece of paper. The number was scribbled across one corner along with the name Cass, and I tapped it into the messenger app on my phone.

  Hi, Cass, it’s Rowan here, I’m the Elincourts’ new nanny. I just wanted to say thank you for having Rhiannon tonight and if there’s any problems, please call or text this number. If you could let me know what time you’ll be dropping her off, that would be great. Thanks. Rowan.

  The reply came back reassuringly quickly, while I was spooning the last of the yogurt into Petra.

  Hi! Nice to “meet” you. Pleasure, it’s always nice to have Rhi over. I imagine we’ll have her back by lunchtime tomorrow but let’s play it by ear. Cass.

  It was only when I went to put Maddie’s drawing back on the stairs that I finally looked at it. It reminded me of the drawing I’d found on the first night, of the house, and the pale little face staring out. But there was something distinctly darker and more disturbing about this one.

  At the center of the page was a crude figure—a little girl, with curly hair and a sticking-out skirt—and she seemed to be locked inside some kind of prison cell. But when I peered at it more closely, I realized, it must be meant to represent the poison garden. The thick black bars of the iron gate were scored across her figure, and she was clutching at them with one hand, and holding something in the other—a branch, I thought, covered in green leaves and red berries. Tears were streaming down her face, her mouth was open in a despairing wail, and there were red scribbles of blood on her face and on her dress. The whole image was encircled in thick black spiraling lines, as if I were staring down the wrong end of a telescope, into some kind of nightmarish tunnel into the past.

  On the one hand, it was just a little girl’s drawing, no different from the sometimes violent scribbles I had seen at the nursery—superheroes gunning down baddies, policemen fighting robbers. But on the other . . . I don’t know. It was hard to put my finger on what made me recoil, but there was something so indescribably nasty about it, so chilling and so full of satisfaction and glee in the macabre subject matter, that I let the paper drop from my fingers to the floor as if it had burned me.

  I stood there, ignoring Petra’s increasingly irritable cries of “Down. Down! Peta down NOW!” behind me, and stared at the picture. I wanted to screw it up and throw it away, but I knew what the child-protection advice at Little Nippers would have been. Put the drawing on file. Flag concerns with the safeguarding officer at the nursery. Discuss the issues raised in the drawing with parents/guardians if deemed appropriate.

  Well, there was no safeguarding officer here except me. But if I were Sandra, I was pretty sure that I would want to know about this. Where Maddie was getting this stuff from, I wasn’t sure, but it needed to be stopped.

  Feeling more disturbed than I wanted to admit, I picked the drawing up from the floor, and slid it carefully into one of the drawers in the study. Then I returned to the kitchen and set about cleaning Petra up, and putting her down for her nap.

  I hadn’t meant to fall asleep in Petra’s room, but I woke with a start, the armchair’s gingham cover wet with drool beneath my cheek, and my heart pounding for reasons I could not put my finger on. Petra was still slumbering in her cot as I struggled upright, trying to figure out what had happened, and what had woken me so abruptly.

  I must have drifted off while waiting for her to fall asleep. Had I— Shit, the thought came like a sudden punch to the solar plexus—had I slept through school pickup? But no. When I checked my phone it was only one thirty.

  Then it came again, the noise that had woken me from sleep. The doorbell. Doorbell sounding flashed on my phone. And then Open door? Confirm / Cancel.

  A Pavlovian jolt of dread flooded through me, and for a moment I sat there, paralyzed, half dreading, half expecting the creak . . . creak . . . to commence as it had last night, but it didn’t, and at last I forced myself to move. I swung my feet to the floor and stood up, waiting for
my blood pressure to settle and my heart to stop drumming with panic in my ears.

  As I did so, I wiped the corner of my mouth and looked down at myself. It was only a few days since I’d turned up—note-perfect in my rendition of Rowan the Perfect Nanny, in her tweed skirt and neatly buttoned cardigan. I looked far from perfect now. I was wearing crumpled jeans, and my sweatshirt was stained with Petra’s breakfast. I looked much closer to the person I really was, as if the real me was leaking out of the cracks in the facade, taking over.

  Well, it was too late to change now. Instead, I left Petra sleeping peacefully in her cot, and made my way down the stairs to the hallway, where I pressed my thumb to the panel, and watched as the door swung silently open.

  For a second it seemed like a continuation of last night—there was no one there. But then I saw the Land Rover parked across the driveway, heard the retreating crunch of gravel, and peering round the side of the house, I saw a tall, broad figure, disappearing towards the stables, two dogs bounding at his heels.

  “Jack?” I called, my voice croaky with sleep. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Hey, Jack, was that you?”

  “Rowan!” He turned at the sound of my voice and came striding back across the yard, grinning widely. “Yes, I rang the bell, I was going to ask if you fancied a cup of tea. But I thought you must have gone out.”

  “No . . . no, I was . . .” I paused, unsure what to say, then, in view of my sleep-crumpled face and draggled clothes, decided maybe the truth was best. “I’d fallen asleep actually. Petra’s down for her nap and I must have drifted off. I— Well, I didn’t get a very good night’s rest last night.”

  “Oh . . . were the girls playing up?”

  “No, no it’s not that. It’s . . .” I paused again, and then screwed up my courage. “It’s those noises I was talking about. From the attic. I got woken up again. Jack, you know those keys you mentioned . . .”

  He was nodding.

  “Aye, sure, no problem. Want to try it now?”