41

Lauren, 2019

‘Birthmark.’ The man’s finger circles his hollow, unshaven cheek. ‘But I’d have recognized you anyway. You haven’t changed that much, Lauren.’

The sound of her name on his chapped lips. Lauren’s mind scatters. She cannot think who he is. What he wants. She must get past him to the front door. Or the kitchen door that leads to the garden? Surely his route in. But this living room is so small, and he so large, he could be on them in moments. She should have pressed that emergency stop button on the London–Penzance train carriage wall while she still had the chance. Mum, she keens. Mum.

But Dixie can no longer save her. And no one’s coming anytime soon since no one knows where they are. And this is her fault for not mentioning visiting this place, worrying about looking a freak. She’s messed up in every possible direction. Raff’s breath lands in little warm puffs on her neck, a reminder of what’s at stake.

She tries to draw up courage from deep inside, where it’s always lived. And she can almost feel her mother beside her then, a warm current in the cold dead air of the room. You stood by that aviary, Laurie. You are stronger than you know.

The dog starts to nose Raff’s dangling feet. ‘Can you call your dog back?’ Her voice shakes.

‘Patty.’ The man clicks his fingers and the dog trots obediently to his side. He strokes its head with gentleness at odds with the rest of him, while pinioning Lauren with a caustic gaze. ‘Have I changed that much? Lost my boyish looks?’

‘I really don’t know you.’ There’s something about this man that suggests he hasn’t got much to lose. That life has not been kind. Her heart is banging so hard he must be able to hear it. And smell her fear.

‘Oh, you do.’ A pulverizing stare. ‘Come on, Lauren.’

She edges towards the kitchen, careful to keep the disintegrating sofa between them. But her legs are like jelly, and every muscle flex, every movement, seems cartoonishly exaggerated in the fleshy air. The cottage is a terrible inversion of the happy, warm place it used to be.

‘I’d offer you a cuppa, but the kettle is on the blink.’ A smile plays at the corners of his mouth. ‘It’s me, Lauren. Me, Pete. Gemma’s brother.’

Pete. Lauren’s knees buckle. The decades thrash back. The walls brighten into Battenberg cake yellows and pinks; Viv’s laughing in the kitchen, her phone receiver crooked under her chin. Lauren blinks away the déjà vu. Yet Pete remains. It’s like being stuck in a nightmare, trying to run away but unable to lift her feet.

It is Pete Heap. But it is not Pete Heap. The years have etched their way across his features and given his face a Dickensian, pinched quality. But the silvery blue of his eyes is the same.

As a boy, Pete was watchful, with a big goofy smile when it broke. She’d liked him. At times she’d even wished he were her brother because he was funny – teasing, rather than cruel – and sweetly protective of Gemma. And, in a way she sensed rather than fully understood, he was more of her world than Kat and Flora, in the same way that her mum was more like down-to-earth Viv Heap than Kat and Flora’s mothers. But that connection no longer exists. The shock of him threads down her spine. Any relief that this menacing man is Pete – someone she once knew, liked – melts away. ‘What … what are you doing here?’

‘I was walking this one.’ He ruffles the dog’s ears. ‘Smelt that hail coming, we did, didn’t we, Patty?’

Lauren thinks of his mum Viv saying something similar years ago about smelling rain. Viv, lying on her towel in the front garden, lithe, oiled and brown, hair piled on her head, not looking like a cleaner. The memory frays.

‘Check it out.’ He nods to the window. ‘Snowing now. I can’t remember the last time it snowed around here. Pretty, isn’t it?’

Nothing is pretty. Through the grimy window the snow looks grey, like dying moths. The collective noun for moths is an eclipse, she remembers randomly, her mind seeking its own escape route. ‘Pretty,’ she agrees weakly, holding Raff tighter, as if her grasp might protect him.

Pete stomps his feet to keep out the chill. ‘I like to check in on this place, time to time, you see.’ His conversational tone belies the fact he is blocking their exit. ‘Can’t help myself. Houses are never just bricks and mortar, are they?’ His mouth presses into a line and his eyes spark. ‘You’d know something about that too, I guess.’

Lauren nods, trying to pretend this is normal, that she hasn’t worked out that Pete must have seen them enter then stolen in round the back. The scuffing sound was surely the dog’s claws on the kitchen floor. A gull swoops down and settles on a windowsill outside and its cold avian eye meets hers. Nothing happens. Lauren is already in a fight-or-flight state, heart racing, mouth dry, only this time it’s a threat her rational brain understands too. And the gull’s relative power shrinks. She’d swap its presence for Pete’s in a heartbeat.

‘This cottage will be buried before too long,’ Pete says, punching his hands deep into his coat pockets. ‘Ground’s going to open right up and suck it down.’

Raff yawns and rests his head on her shoulder, staring at the dog, which thumps its tail wetly on the carpet.

‘Foundations shot.’ Pete nods towards a wall with a jagged crack, like a lightning strike, running up it. ‘Old tin-mine shaft collapsed below.’

Lauren pictures a sinkhole gaping open beneath them, vanishing without trace.

‘Health and flipping safety.’ Pete strides to the damaged wall and pats it affectionately, like a farmer might the flank of a favourite old cow. ‘Forced us out years ago. Oh, yeah, and burglars broke in. Bust the locks. Couldn’t find anything worth nicking, obviously.’

‘That’s terrible, Pete.’ She must keep him sweet, keep talking. Get him on side. He’s moved from the front door now, no longer blocking it. ‘How is your mum?’

Just for a moment, his face softens. ‘Bearing up, you know.’

Her heart aches. She considers telling him about all the letters she’s written to Viv over the years, then thrown away, having lost her nerve to send them. ‘And your dad?’

He’s silent. Lauren notes how he’s inherited the net-hauling bulk of his Kernow forefathers. Her mind trips to a ring net, its circle tightening, bagging its catch. White and red entrails swimming on a boat deck. A fisherman’s blood-spattered oilskins.

‘Long time dead,’ he says eventually.

‘I’m sorry.’ With Pete now having moved, Lauren can draw a line between her and Raff and the front door. She may just have a chance. ‘It’s great to see you again, Pete. But we should go.’ She tries and fails to sound casual. Four big steps. Five. ‘Raff needs his tea.’

He narrows his eyes at Raff and mutters, ‘Yours?’

Raff shyly buries his face in Lauren’s neck, sticky with snot from his dripping nose.

‘Nephew.’ Lauren searches for a smile but her mouth is too tense and won’t work properly.

‘Which sister?’

‘Flora’s,’ she says quietly, and instantly regrets it, without knowing why.

‘Sure, looks like a Finch.’

‘Everyone in the house is going to start wondering where we are and come looking, aren’t they, Raff?’ she says, although she knows no one’s knocking on a deserted cottage door in the middle of a snowstorm any time soon. And Pete probably does too.

Raff pulls on her earlobe for attention. ‘Hungry.’

‘Oh, yes, a snack. Good idea,’ she says. ‘Let’s see what Mummy packed.’ Lauren twists and manages to rifle in her bag. Pete’s eyes bore into her as she pulls out a box of raisins. Pretending to look for more, she goes back in for her phone, and tries to stab 999, hidden by the rucksack.

‘Leave the phone, Lauren.’

She freezes, terrified.

‘Nice your sister has got a family of her own now. Nice motor too. And how grand that you all held on to the fancy house all those years so you can tootle back whenever, eh?’ His smile twists. ‘Some people get all the luck, right? Some people get to forget.’ A vein pulses in his neck. ‘I’m not one of those people.’

‘Pete …’ she says precariously, not knowing how to begin. She glances at the nearest window. A hard kick might do it. But she can’t push Raff out there on his own. If she doesn’t escape with him, he’ll be lost in these conditions. ‘I am so, so sorry.’

‘Are you? Are you really? Champagne! Woo-hoo!’ The mood shifts dangerously. ‘The evening you arrived, I saw you all, clinking glasses. All lit up in that big house. It made me want to retch. The little people can be forgotten. A few lines in the local newspaper. You lot kept your names out of it, didn’t you? Bad boy artist didn’t fancy that sort of press. Not that bad, right?’

Lauren’s heart knocks against her ribs. Her quickening breath scrolls white into the room.

‘Shame it wasn’t one of you golden girls.’ He fights a suppressed sob. ‘Or the mad redhead.’

Lauren inhales to speak. But she doesn’t want to pull the thread that holds her together: the story she’s woven around herself, protective and comforting as a silky cocoon.

‘Why my sister?’ His face is savage with sadness. ‘Why my Gemma?’

The carpeted floor seems to lilt to one side. She survived. Gemma did not. And now it is her turn. A different cage. A different fate. Helplessness engulfs her. But then there’s Raff’s cold fingertips again, tapping her cheek, a reminder of the vulnerable little person she must save, as she didn’t save Gemma. She surges towards the front door. And she’s there, almost out, the rush of freezing air on her face. Snowflakes starring her black coat sleeve.

The beam of Pete’s arm falls, barring her exit. ‘Not so fast.’