The Turn of the Key

by Ruth Ware

  I remember her wail, that awful sound, as she saw her sister’s body. I don’t think I will ever forget that.

  I remember Jack taking Rhiannon inside and then trying to pull me away, saying she’s dead, she’s dead, we can’t disturb the body, Rowan, we have to leave her for the police, and I couldn’t let her go, I could only weep and cry.

  I remember the flashing blue lights of the police at the gate, and Rhiannon’s face, white and stricken as she tried to comprehend.

  And I remember sitting there, covered in blood on the velvet sofa, as they asked me what happened, what happened, what happened.

  And I still don’t know.

  * * *

  I still don’t know, Mr. Wrexham, and that’s the truth.

  I know what the police think, from the questions they asked, and the scenarios they put to me.

  They think that Maddie went up to my room to find me missing, and that she saw something incriminating up there—perhaps she went to the window and saw me creeping back from Jack’s flat. Or perhaps they think she found something in my belongings, something to do with my real name, my true identity.

  I don’t know. I had so much to hide, after all.

  And they think that I came back to find her there, and realized what she had seen, and that I opened the window and that—

  I can’t say it. It’s hard even to write it. But I have to.

  They think that I threw her out. They think that I stood there, with the curtains blowing wide, and watched her bleed to death on the cobblestones, and then went back downstairs to drink tea, and wait calmly for Rhiannon to come home.

  They think that I left the window open deliberately, to try to make it seem like she could have fallen. But they are sure that she didn’t. I am not certain why—I think it’s something to do with the position of where she landed—too far away from the building to be a slip, with an arc that could only have been caused by a push, or a jump.

  Would Maddie have jumped? That’s a question I have asked myself a thousand, maybe a million times.

  And the truth is, I just don’t know.

  We may never know. Because the irony is, Mr. Wrexham, in a house filled with a dozen cameras, there are none that show what happened to Maddie that night. The camera in her room shows nothing but darkness. It points away from the door, at the girls’ beds, so there is not even a silhouette in the doorway to show what time Maddie left.

  And as for my room . . . oh God . . . as for my room, that is one of the bricks in the edifice of evidence the police built against me.

  “Why did you cover the security camera in your room if you had nothing to hide?” they kept asking me again, and again, and again.

  And I tried to tell them—to explain what it’s like to be a young woman, alone, in a strange house, with strangers watching you. I tried to tell them how I was okay with a camera in the kitchen, the den, the living room, the corridors, even with cameras in the girls’ rooms. But that I needed somewhere, just one place, where I could be myself, unwatched, unmonitored. Where I could be not Rowan but Rachel—just for a few hours.

  “Would you want a camera in your bedroom?” I asked the detective, point-blank, but he just shrugged as if to say, It’s not me on trial, love.

  But the truth is, I did cover up that camera. And if I hadn’t, we might know what happened to Maddie.

  Because, I didn’t kill her, Mr. Wrexham. I know I’ve said that already. I told you in the very first letter I sent you. I didn’t kill her, and you have to believe me, because it’s the truth. But I don’t know, writing these words in my cramped cell, with the Scottish rain drizzling down the window outside . . . Have I convinced you? How I wish I could persuade you to come here. I’ve put you on my list of visitors. You could come tomorrow, even. And I could look into your eyes and tell you—I didn’t kill her.

  But I didn’t convince the police of that. I didn’t convince Mr. Gates either.

  In the end, I’m not sure I even convince myself.

  For if I hadn’t left her that night, if I hadn’t spent those hours with Jack, in his flat, in his arms, none of this would have happened.

  I didn’t kill her, but her death is on my hands. My little sister.

  If you didn’t kill her, who did? Help us out here, Rachel. Tell us what you think happened, the police asked, again and again, and I could only shake my head. Because the truth is, Mr. Wrexham, I don’t know. I have constructed a thousand theories—each wilder than the other. Maddie, leaping like a bird into the night; Rhiannon, coming back early from her night out somehow; Jean McKenzie, hiding in the attic; Jack Grant, creeping past me while I was waiting downstairs for Rhiannon.

  Because Jack turned out to have secrets too, did you know that? Nothing as grand or melodramatic as what I had imagined—he wasn’t related to Dr. Kenwick Grant, or at least if he was, neither he nor the police managed to trace the link. And when I told the police about the hank of string in his kitchen and the Aconitum napellus blossom, he, unlike me, had a quick and reasonable explanation. Because Jack, it seemed, had recognized the purple flower sitting in the coffee cup on the kitchen table—or thought he had. And so he had taken it with him to compare it to the plants in the poison garden. When he discovered that what he had suspected was correct, that the flower in the kitchen was not just poisonous but deadly, he had removed my makeshift string barrier, and replaced it with a padlock and chain.

  No, Jack’s deep, dark secret was much more mundane than that. And instead of exonerating me, it only piled up the evidence against me—adding to the weight of reasons I might have wanted to cover up my liaison with him.

  Jack was married.

  When they realized I didn’t know, the police took great delight in ramming the fact home, reminding me at every possible opportunity, as if they wanted to see me wince with pain afresh each time. But the truth was, I was beyond caring. What did it matter, if Jack already had a wife and a two-year-old back in Edinburgh? He had promised me nothing. And in the face of Maddie’s death, none of it seemed important.

  I would be lying though if I said that in the days and weeks and months since I’ve been in here I haven’t thought of him and wondered why. Why hadn’t he told me about her? About his little boy? Why were they living apart? Was it financial—was he sending money back to them? If the Elincourts were paying him half as much as they’d offered me, it was more than plausible that he’d taken the job for money reasons.

  But maybe not. Perhaps they were separated, estranged. Perhaps she’d thrown him out, and this offer of a job, with a flat attached, had been the perfect way to move on.

  I don’t know, because I never had the chance to ask him. I never saw him again, after I was taken down to the station for questioning, and then cautioned, and then remanded in custody. He never wrote. He never phoned. He never visited.

  The last time I saw him was as I stumbled into the back of a police car, still covered in Maddie’s blood, feeling his hands gripping mine, strong and steady.

  “It’ll be all right, Rowan.” It was the last thing he said to me, the last words I heard as the car door slammed shut behind me and the engine started up.

  It was a lie. A lie, from first to last. I was not Rowan. And nothing was ever going to be all right again.

  But the thing I keep coming back to is what Maddie said to me that very first time I met her, her arms wrapped hard around me, her face buried in my top.

  Don’t come here, she had said. It’s not safe.

  And then, those last words, sobbed in parting, and later denied, words that I am still certain I heard, months later.

  The ghosts wouldn’t like it.

  I don’t believe in ghosts, Mr. Wrexham. I never have. I’m not a superstitious person.

  But it was not superstition that I heard pacing the attic above me, night after night. It was not superstition that made me wake in the night, shivering, my breath white clouds in the moonlight, my room cold as an icebox. That doll’s head, rolling across the Persi
an rug, that was real, Mr. Wrexham. Real as you and me. Real as the writing on the walls of the attic, real as my writing to you now.

  Because I know, I know that’s when I really sealed my fate with the police. It wasn’t just the fake name, and the stolen documents. It wasn’t just the fact that I was Bill’s estranged daughter, come back to exact some sort of twisted revenge on his new family. It wasn’t any of that.

  It was what I told them on that first awful night, sitting there in my bloodstained clothes, shaking with shock and grief and terror. Because that first night, I broke down and told them everything that had happened. From the footsteps in the night, to the deep, seeping sense of evil I felt when I opened the attic door and stepped inside.

  That, more than anything that came after, was the moment the key turned in the lock.

  That was when they knew.

  * * *

  I’ve had a lot of time to think in here, Mr. Wrexham. A lot of time to think, and ponder, and figure things out since I started this letter to you. I told the police the truth, and the truth undid me. I know what they saw—a crazed woman, with a backstory more full of holes than a bullet-pocked signpost. They saw a woman with a motive. A woman so estranged from her family that she had come to their house under false pretenses, to enact some terrible, unhinged vengeance.

  I know what I think happened. I have had a long time to put pieces together—the open window, the footsteps in the attic, the father who loved his daughter so much that it killed her, and the father who walked away from his children again and again and again.

  And most of all, two pieces I never connected right up until the very end—the phone, and Maddie’s white, pleading little face, that very first day as I drove away, and her whispered, anguished the ghosts wouldn’t like it. And those two things were what did it for me with the police. My fingerprints on the phone, and my account of what Maddie had said to me, and the domino of effects her words began.

  But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what I think, or what my theories are. It’s what the jury thinks that matters. Listen, Mr. Wrexham, I don’t need you to believe everything that I’ve told you. And I know that presenting even half of what I’ve said here would get you laughed out of court, and risk alienating the jury forever. That’s not why I told you all this.

  But I tried to give just part of the story before—and it’s what got me locked up here.

  I believe that the truth is what will save me, Mr. Wrexham, and the truth is that I didn’t, that I couldn’t kill my sister.

  I picked you, Mr. Wrexham, because when I asked the other women in here who I should get to represent me, your name came up more than any other lawyer. Apparently you’ve got a reputation for getting even no-hopers off the hook.

  And I know that’s what I am, Mr. Wrexham. I have no hope anymore.

  A child is dead, and the police, and the public, and the press, they all want someone to pay. And that someone must be me.

  But I didn’t kill that little girl, Mr. Wrexham. I didn’t kill Maddie.

  I loved her. And I don’t want to rot in jail for something I didn’t do.

  Please, please believe me.

  Yours truly,

  Rachel Gerhardt.

  8th July 2019

  Richard McAdams

  Ashdown Construction Services, internal post.

  Rich, bit of a funny one, one of the guys working on the Charnworth redevelopment found this pile of old papers when he was ripping out a wall. Looks like one of the prisoners hid them. He didn’t know what to do with them, so he passed them to me and I said I’d ask around. I’ve only glanced at the top few, but looks to be a bunch of letters from an inmate to her solicitor before her trial—don’t know why they were never posted. The guy who found them leafed through, and says it was quite a well-known case; he’s a local from round here, and he remembered the headlines.

  Anyway, he felt a bit awkward chucking them in the skip in case they were evidence or legally privileged or something and he ended up on the wrong side of the law by destroying them. TBH, I don’t imagine it matters now—but to put his mind at rest, I said I’d see it was properly dealt with. Is there anyone in management you could sound out about it? Or do you think just ignore and bin? Don’t want to get tied up in a load of paperwork.

  The top part is her letters to the lawyer, but she’d also hidden a few letters written to her in the same place. They seem to be just family stuff, but I’m sticking them in the packet as well, just in case.

  Anyway, be very grateful if I could leave it with you to decide what to do, if anything.

  Cheers,

  Phil

  1st November 2017

  Dear Rachel,

  Well. It feels very strange addressing you by that name, but here we are.

  I must start by saying how sorry I am about what happened. I imagine that’s not what you expected me to say, but I am, and I’m not ashamed to say it.

  What you must understand is that I have watched over those children for the best part of five years now—and I’ve watched more nannies come and go than I’ve had hot dinners. I was the one who had to sit and watch while that baggage Holly carried on with Mr. Elincourt under his wife’s nose, and I was the one who patched everything up when she walked out and left the girls in bits. And since then, I’ve had to sit there and watch as nanny after nanny came and went, and broke those poor bairns’ hearts a bit more every time.

  And every time they came, and they were another pretty young lass, I felt it like a cold hand around my heart and I lay awake at night and I wondered—should I tell Mrs. Elincourt what kind of a man her husband was, and what kind of a woman that Holly was, and why she really left? And every time I found I couldn’t do it, and I swallowed my anger, and I told myself it would be different next time.

  So I confess, when I met you, and found out that Mrs. Elincourt had hired yet another pretty young girl, my heart sank. Because I knew what he would be up to, and whatever kind of girl you were, whether you were one to make the most of your opportunities, like Holly, or one who shrank from him, I knew either way those poor children would be the ones to suffer again when you upped and left, maybe taking him with you this time. And that made me very angry. Yes it did. I’m not ashamed to say that. But I am ashamed of how I treated you—I should not have taken my anger out on you like that, and I feel heart sorry when I think back on some of the things I said to you. Because whatever the police say, I know that you would have walked a mile over glass before you hurt one of those little lassies, and I told the officer who interviewed me so, I wanted you to know that. I said, I did not like that girl, and I made no secret of it, but she would not have hurt wee Maddie, and you are barking up the wrong tree, young man.

  So anyway, that is partly why I am writing. To say all of that to you, and get it off my chest.

  But the other reason is because Ellie has written you a letter. She put it in an envelope and sealed it up before she gave it to me, and she made me promise not to read it, and I said I would not. I have kept that promise, because I think you should keep your word, even to children, but I must ask you, if there is anything in that letter you think I should know, or anything that you think her mother should know, you must tell us.

  There is no point in writing to the house, for it is shut up, and God knows Mrs. Elincourt has enough on her plate to worry about, poor woman. She has left her husband, did the police tell you that? She has taken the children and moved back down south to her own family. And Mr. Elincourt has moved away too—there is some sort of lawsuit against him connected with an intern at his firm, or so they are saying in the village, and the rumor is that the house will have to be sold to pay for the legal fees.

  But I am putting my address at the bottom of this letter, and I ask that if you have any concerns, you write to me there, and I will do whatever needs to be done. I have faith that you will do that, for I believe that you loved those children, as I did and do. I don’t believe you will let any harm com
e to Ellie, will you? I have prayed to God, and tried to listen to His answer, and I am trusting you on this, Rachel. I pray that you won’t let me down.

  Yours very sincerely,

  Jean McKenzie

  15a High Street

  Carn Bridge

  From:

  To:

  Subject:

  Dave Owen only they said that your name is Rachel is that true

  I miss you a lot and I am fairy very sorry about what happened especially because it’s all my fault but I can’t tell anyone especially not mummy or Daddy because they will be so angry and then daddy will go away like he tried to before like Maddie always said he would

  it was me Rowan I pushed mad he because she was going to make you go away like the others she made all the others go away by playing tricks with Mummy’s old phone she took their things and she kind into the Attic window up the roof from your room the Attic was her secret den where she always went but she said I was too little to climb up and the she made the happy wake them up in the night and she took a YouTube video and played it on the speakers on the happy to make it sound like there was people in the Attic walking around but it wasn’t it was just the video and she took the dollies head out of the attic and she made me put the doggies head on your lap and I am so sorry because I said it wasn’t true and it was it was me who did that

  she woke up and you weren’t there and mad he was going to poison you with you berries but I ran after her and I poured the wine down the sink and then Maddie was fairy angry and she said she said she was going to climb into the attic window again and get you into trouble with Mummy by setting off all the alarms because you had gone and I ran after her an eye asked not to do it and she said no I will do it or she will take Daddy away and I said no don’t Rowan with nice and I don’t want her to go she wouldn’t do that and mad he said I’m going to a new can’t stop me and she kind up and I pushed her I didn’t mean for 2 happen and I am so sorry