by Ruth Ware
But you don’t need me to finish the sentence, do you, Mr. Wrexham? You know why. At least, I imagine you do, if you’ve read the papers. You know, because the police know. Because they found out. Because they put two and two together, as you are very possibly doing, even now.
You know that the reason I would never sleep with Bill Elincourt was because he was my father too.
I told you, Mr. Wrexham, didn’t I, that I wasn’t even looking for a job when I stumbled across the advert? In fact I was doing something totally different, something I’d done many times before.
I was googling my father’s name.
I’d always known who he was, and for a while I’d even known where he was—a fancy semidetached house in Crouch End, with electric gates that slid automatically across the driveway, and a shiny BMW on the forecourt. I had been there once in my midteens, under the cover of a pretended shopping trip to Oxford Street with a friend. I remember the taste in my mouth, the way my hands shook when I showed the bus driver my travel card, every step of the walk from Crouch End Broadway.
I stood outside that gate for a long time, consumed with a strange mix of fear and anger, too afraid to ring the bell and face up to the man I’d never met, the man who had walked out when my mother was nine months pregnant.
He sent checks for a while, but he wasn’t on my birth certificate, and I suppose my mother was too proud to pursue him and force him to pay.
Instead, she picked herself up, got a job in an insurer’s firm, and met the man she eventually married. The man—the message was very clear—that she should have been with all along.
And so, when I was six, we moved into his boxy little house.
It was their home. Hers and his. It was never mine. Not from the day I moved into the little room above the stairs and was told sharply not to scuff my suitcase on the hall baseboards. Not until the day I packed a different, larger suitcase and moved out, twelve long years later.
It was their home, but I—I was always there to spoil it for them. This living, breathing, constant reminder of my mother’s past. Of the man who had left her. And every day, she had to look at me staring at her over the breakfast cereal with his eyes. When she brushed my thick, wiry hair into a ponytail, it was his hair she brushed, not her own fine, flyaway stuff.
For that was all I had from him. That, and the necklace he had sent me on my first birthday, the last contact I had from him. A necklace with my initial on it—R for Rachel.
Cheap, nasty rubbish, my mother had called it, but that didn’t stop me from wearing it all the hours I was allowed. At weekends, at first, and every day in the holidays, and then when I began work as an au pair, tucking it beneath my T-shirts and plastic aprons, so that it was always there, the worn metal warm between my breasts.
I was working as a nanny in Highgate when she rang me up and told me. She and my stepfather were selling the house and retiring to Spain. Just like that. It wasn’t that I had any particular affection for that house—I had never been happy there.
But it had been . . . well, if not my home, at any rate, the only place I could call home. “Of course you’re welcome to come and visit,” she said, her voice high and slightly defensive, as if she knew what she was doing, and I think it was that, more than anything, that made me lose it. You’re welcome to come and visit. It was the kind of thing you say to a distant relative, or a friend you don’t particularly like, hoping they won’t take you up on the offer.
I told her to fuck off. I’m not proud of that. I told her that I hated her, that I’d had four years of therapy to try to deal with my upbringing, and that I never wanted to hear from her again.
It wasn’t true. Of course it wasn’t true. Even now, even here, at Charnworth, she was the first person I put on my prison call list. But she’s never called.
It was two days after her announcement that I went back to Crouch End.
I was twenty-two. And I wasn’t angry this time. I was just . . . I was terribly, terribly sad. I had lost the only parent I’d ever known—and my need to replace her with something, however poor and inadequate, was consuming me.
“Hello . . . Bill.” I had practiced the words in my bedroom the night before, standing in front of the mirror. My face was scrubbed clean of makeup, making me look younger and even more vulnerable, though that hadn’t been my intention, and I found that my voice was unnaturally high, as if I wanted to make an appeal to his pity. I didn’t know what kind of daughter he’d want—but I was prepared to try and be that person. “Hello, Bill. You don’t know me, but I’m Rachel. I’m Catherine’s daughter.”
My heart was thudding in my chest as I walked up to the gate and rang the bell, waiting for the gate to slide back, or perhaps the crackle of voices to come over the intercom. But nothing happened.
I tried again, holding the buzzer long and hard, and eventually the front door opened and a small woman in an overall, holding a duster, came out across the shingled drive.
“Hello?” She was in her forties or fifties, and her voice was heavily accented—Polish, I thought, or perhaps Russian. Eastern Europe. “I can help you?”
“Oh . . . hello.” My pulse rate had sped up, until I thought I might possibly faint from nerves. “Hello. I’m looking for Mr.—” I swallowed. “Mr. Elincourt. Bill Elincourt. Is he here?”
“He is not here.”
“Oh, well, will he be back later?”
“He gone. New family now.”
“Wh-what do you mean?”
“He and his wife moved last year. Different country. Scotland. New family is here now. Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright.”
Oh. Fuck.
It was like a punch to the gut.
“Do you . . . do you have an address?” I asked, my voice faltering, and she shook her head. There was pity in her eyes.
“Sorry, I do not have, I am just cleaning.”
“You—” I swallowed hard. “You mentioned a wife. Mrs. Elincourt. Can I ask—what’s her name?”
I don’t know why that was suddenly important to me. Only that I knew the trail had gone cold, and any scraps of information seemed better than nothing. The cleaner looked at me sadly. Who did she think I was? A spurned girlfriend? A former employee? Or maybe she had guessed the truth.
“She called Sandra,” she said at last, very quietly. “I must go now.” And then she turned and made her way back into the house.
I turned too and began the long walk back to Highgate, saving the bus fare. There was a hole in my shoe, and as I started up the hill, it began to rain, and I knew I had lost my chance.
* * *
After that I didn’t try looking again in earnest for a few years. And then, one day, when I was idly typing Bill Elincourt into Google, there it was. The advert. With a house in Scotland. And a wife called Sandra.
And a family.
And suddenly, I couldn’t not.
It was like the universe had set this up for me—to give me a chance.
I didn’t want him to be my dad, not now, not after all these years. I just wanted to . . . well, just to see, I suppose. But obviously, I couldn’t travel up to Scotland under my own name without telling him who I was, and setting up a whole weight of expectation and potential rejection. Even with nearly thirty years of water under the bridge, it was unlikely that Bill would have forgotten the name of his firstborn daughter, and Gerhardt was unusual enough as a surname for him to do a double take, and register it as that of the mother of his child.
But I didn’t need to go under my own name. In fact, I had a better name, a better identity, just ready and waiting for me. One that would get me through the front door without any strings attached, at which point I could do whatever I wanted. And so I picked up the papers that Rowan had left so temptingly lying around in her bedroom—the papers that were, almost, going to waste. The papers so very, very close to my own that really, it didn’t seem like much of a deception at all.
And I applied.
I didn’t expect to get the job. I
didn’t even want it. I just wanted to meet the man who had abandoned me all those years before. But when I saw Heatherbrae, I knew, Mr. Wrexham. I knew that one visit was never going to be enough for me. I wanted to be a part of all this, to sleep in the softness of those feather beds, to sink into the velvet sofas, to bask under the rainwater showers—to be a part of this family, in short.
And I wanted, very, very badly, to meet Bill.
And when he didn’t appear at the interview, I could see only one way to make that happen.
I had to get the job.
But when I did . . . and when I met Bill that first night, and realized the kind of man he was, God, it’s like a metaphor for this whole thing, Mr. Wrexham. It’s all connected. The beauty and luxury of this house, and the seeping poison underneath the high-tech facade. The solid Victorian wood of a closet door, with its polished brass escutcheon—and the cold, rank smell of death that breathes out of the hole.
There was something sick in that house, Mr. Wrexham. And whether Bill had been sick when he went there and brought it with him, or whether he had caught its sickness and become the man I met on that first night, that predatory, abusive man, I don’t know.
All I know is that the two run hand in hand, and that if you scratched the walls of Heatherbrae House, scoring the hand-blocked peacock wallpaper with your nails, or gouging the polished granite tiles, that same darkness would seep out, the darkness that lay very close beneath Bill Elincourt’s skin.
Don’t look for him. That was one of the few things my mother had said to me about him, before she shut off the subject completely. Don’t look for him, Rachel. Nothing good will come of it.
She was right. God, she was so right. And how I wish I’d listened to her.
“Come on,” I said at last. “Up to bed, Rhiannon. You’re tired, I’m tired, we’ve both had too much to drink . . . We’ll talk about all this in the morning.”
I’d ring Sandra and explain. Somehow. With my head aching from the beginnings of a hangover, and tiredness scratching at the back of my eyes, I could not quite think of the words, but they would come. They would have to. I couldn’t carry on like this, being blackmailed by Rhiannon.
For a moment, as I climbed the stairs, Rhiannon in front of me, I had an absurd mental picture of Sandra welcoming me with open arms, telling me I completed their family, telling me— But no. That was ridiculous, and I knew it. Even the most generous of women would take time to adjust to a long-lost stepchild turning up, and to find out this way, in these circumstances . . . well. I had no illusions how the conversation was likely to pan out. Difficult would be the best-case scenario.
Well, I had made my bed, and I would have to lie on it. I would almost certainly be sacked—I couldn’t really see any way around that. But I was fairly sure that Bill would not want to sue his estranged daughter, to whose mother he had paid just pennies in child support, before disappearing for good. It would not be a good look for Elincourt and Elincourt. No, it would be swept under the rug, and I’d be free to carry on. Alone.
And far away from Heatherbrae.
* * *
I hadn’t really thought about my room and where I was going to sleep until we got to the second-floor landing, and Rhiannon turned the handle on her graffitied bedroom door and flung her shoes in, with total unconcern.
“Good night,” she said, as if nothing had happened, as if the events of the night had been just another family row.
“Good night,” I said, and I took a deep breath and opened the door to the bedroom. The strange phone was hard in my pocket, and my necklace—the necklace I had feared Bill Elincourt might recognize—lay warm around my neck.
Inside, the door to the attic was shut and locked, as I had left it. I was about to grab my night things and take them downstairs to the sofa to try to catch a few hours before dawn when there was a sudden gust of wind, making the trees outside groan. The curtains flapped suddenly and wildly in the breeze, and the fresh pine-laden scent of a Scottish night filled the room.
The room was still painfully cold, just as it had been earlier that night, and suddenly I realized. The cold had never come from the attic—it must have been the window, open all along. Only before I had been so fixated on finding out the truth of what was behind the locked door that I hadn’t even glanced towards the curtains.
At least the chill was explained then. Nothing supernatural—just the cold night air.
But the problem was, I had not opened that window. I hadn’t even touched it since I slammed it shut a few nights before. And now, suddenly, my stomach was turning over and over in a way that made me feel very, very sick.
Turning, I ran out of the room and down the stairs, ignoring Rhiannon’s sleepy “What the fuck?” as I slammed the door behind me. Downstairs, my heart hammering in my chest, I opened Petra’s bedroom door, the wood shushing on the thick carpet, and waited for my eyes to get adjusted to the dim light.
She was there, quite asleep, her arms and legs flung out, and I felt my pulse rate calm, just a little, but I had to check on the others before I could relax.
Down the corridor then, to the door marked Princess Ellie and Queen Maddie.
It was shut, and I turned the handle very softly, pushing gently. It was pitch-black inside without the night-light, the blackout curtains shutting out even the moonlight, and I cursed myself for forgetting to switch it on, but when my eyes got used to the darkness, I could hear the faint sound of snores, and I felt my breath coming a little more easily. Thank God. Thank God they were okay.
I tiptoed across the thick carpet and felt along the wall for the lead to the night-light, followed it back to the switch, and then I switched it on. And there they were, Ellie scrunched into a tight little ball as though trying to hide from something, Maddie scooched down under the duvet so that I could see nothing except her shape beneath the covers.
My panic calmed as I turned back to the door, laughing at myself for my paranoia.
And then . . . I stopped.
It was ridiculous, I knew that, but I just had to check, I had to see . . .
I tiptoed across the carpet and drew back the cover. To find . . .
. . . a pillow, pushed into the curved shape of a sleeping child.
My heart began to race sickeningly hard.
* * *
The first thing I did was check under the bed. Then all the cupboards in the room.
“Maddie,” I whispered, as loud as I dared, not wanting to wake Ellie but hearing the panicked urgency in my own voice. “Maddie?”
But there was no answering sound, not even a stifled giggle. Just nothing. Nothing.
I ran out of the room.
“Maddie?” I called louder this time. I rattled the handle of the bathroom, but it was unlocked, and when the door swung open I saw its emptiness, the moonlight streaming across the bare tiles.
“Maddie?”
Nothing in Sandra and Bill’s bedroom either, just the unruffled smoothness of the bed, the moonlit expanse of carpet, the white columns of the open curtains standing sentinel either side of the tall windows. I flung open the closets, but the faint illumination of the automatic lights showed nothing but neat rows of suits and racks of high heels.
“What is it?” Rhiannon’s sleepy voice came from upstairs. “What the fuck’s going on?”
“It’s Maddie,” I called up, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. “She’s not in bed. Can you look upstairs? Maddie!”
Petra was stirring now, woken by my increasingly loud calls, and I heard her crotchety grumble, preparatory to a full-on wail, but I didn’t stop to comfort her. I had to find Maddie. Had she come downstairs to find me when I was with Jack? The thought gave me an unpleasant lurch, followed by another, even more unpleasant.
Had she— Oh God. Had she possibly followed me? I had left the back door unlocked. Could she have gone looking for me in the grounds?
Horrible visions ran through my mind. The pond. The stream. Even the road.
&nb
sp; Ignoring Petra, I ran down the stairs, shoved my feet into the first pair of Wellingtons I found at the back door, and ran out into the moonlight.
The cobbled yard was empty.
“Maddie!” I called, full-throated, desperate now, hearing my voice echo from the stone walls of the stables and back to the house. “Maaaddie? Where are you?”
There was no answer, and I had a sudden, even more horrible thought, worse than the forest clearing, with the treacherously muddy pond.
The poison garden.
The poison garden left unlocked and unguarded by Jack Grant.
It had already killed one little girl.
Dear God, I prayed, as I began to sprint towards the back of the house, towards the path down through the shrubbery, my feet slipping in the too-big Wellingtons. Please let it not claim another.
But as I rounded the corner of the house, I found her.
She was lying crumpled facedown below my bedroom window, sprawled across the cobblestones in her nightdress, the white cotton soaked through and through with blood, so much blood I would never have imagined her small body could hold it all.
It ran across the cobbles like treacle, thick and sticky, slicking my knees as I knelt in it, clinging to my fingers as I picked her up, cradling her, feeling the birdlike fragility of her little bones, begging her, pleading with her to be okay.
But of course it was impossible.
She would never be okay again. Nothing would.
She was quite, quite dead.
The next few hours are the ones that the police have made me go over again and again, like nails scratching and scratching at a wound, making it bleed afresh every time. And yet, even after all their questions, the memories only come in snatches, like a night illuminated by flashes of lightning, with darkness in between.
I remember screaming, holding Maddie’s body for what felt like the longest time, until first Jack came, and then Rhiannon, holding a wailing Petra in her arms, almost dropping her when she saw the horror of what had happened.
