Coming through the front door that evening, Rose pauses in the hallway. She waits for a moment then takes a tentative look into the living room. No one there. Then she walks into the kitchen. All clear. Letting out a breath, she feels her shoulders dropping a little bit. To be really sure, she would need to check the rest of the house, but it feels as though she is alone.
It’s a thing she does so often it’s almost normal now when actually it is about as far from that as it’s possible to be.
Rose isn’t exactly sure when Adele Gifford first began to appear, despite having been dead for twelve years, but it got much worse last winter when she was working on the Oakley case. Her mother would simply be there, perhaps at the kitchen table, or hunched in an armchair in the living room, wearing her ratty old fur coat, and looking back at Rose with an almost defiant expression. See, you thought you’d got rid of me.
Not that she ever spoke.
Lately she has been absent but Rose isn’t under any illusions that she has gone for good. She assumed that once before after a quiet period and had begun feeling a little more settled. A little more normal. She was so confident that, when things took an exciting change of direction with her colleague and friend Sam Malik, she brought him back to the house to spend the night.
But Adele had appeared right by the bed at 2 a.m., staring down with disapproval on the sleepy, entwined bodies. Rose had screamed the house down. Yes, she could have said it was a nightmare, but it all felt too complicated. Too much. Rose essentially pushed Sam away the next day and their friendship never really recovered.
Adele is a burden she can’t ever share and one of the reasons Rose is tied to this grim little house in East Barnet.
But her home has become even less appealing since the events of last year.
The time it took for her to wake up – in total blackness – and to be knocked unconscious by James Oakley probably lasted about three minutes in total. But in her mind, particularly at bedtime, that sensation of utter, paralysing terror and helplessness plays on an endless loop. It’s why she can only sleep in catnaps, and never in the bedroom where it happened. So she is either on the lumpy old sofa or in the single bed of her childhood room, which is stuffed with rubbish.
Rose is, frankly, knackered.
She diverts her mind from thoughts of bedtime now by starting to prep her dinner.
This has been one of the resolutions since the night she almost died: to stop living like a student and to look after herself a bit more.
Once she has a neat pile of chopped onions and carrots in front of her, she regards them, not completely sure what she was going to do with them. Then she goes to the fridge to get out a bottle of wine. No intentions of giving that up yet. If she can stay lightly oiled in this house, she can cope with the dark terror that comes sweeping in, bombarding her senses with horror.
Sitting down at the kitchen table with her drink, she flicks through Instagram.
The latest update from Sam causes a jolt in her stomach. It’s him and his girlfriend Lucy, heads together on an evening out. Sam’s eyes are hazy enough for Rose to know that he’s pissed, and Lucy has a proprietorial gleam in hers that makes Rose grimace.
Got to let that go.
Sam was one of Rose’s best friends at Silverton Street station and it all went wrong after they slept together. And now he’s engaged and off limits. But she still misses him. She misses his company, but part of it is an ache for what Might Have Been.
She lets out a slightly tragic sigh. Admitting how deep her loneliness goes, even to herself, is horrible. It seems that having lustful thoughts about Adam, who is totally out of bounds, is not enough to fill the gaping hole in her life.
With a sudden hot burst of determination, Rose picks up her phone. For the next few minutes, her fingers are a blur as she taps at the screen.
Then she sits back, heart racing as if from exertion.
It was about time she got on a dating app. About time she got out there and behaved like a normal, young person.
Her phone startles her when it rings. The display says Unknown Caller.
‘DC Rose Gifford,’ she says, a little wary.
Silence.
‘Hello?’
Someone’s there. She can hear them breathing on the other end.
‘Wow, that’s quite old-school, isn’t it?’ she says but then another sound makes her stop dead.
It’s a wet, bubbly sniff. The very one she heard earlier today.
‘Gregory?’ she says, quietly. ‘Is that you?’
Silence, then more sniffing. Is he crying?
‘Gregory—’ she’s more focused now ‘—is your mum or dad there? Can you put them on? Is everything all right?’
He, or whoever it is, has hung up.
Rose thinks about the business card she left with Gwen Fuller earlier. The kid is probably just being curious or something. She thinks of that little smile he gave at the window. It could be that he’s enjoying all this attention. It could be that he is causing all this attention. But what if it’s some kind of cry for help?
She dials the number the call came from but it rings out. Next she tries Adam.
Adam takes a few minutes to reply and there’s the sound of laughter and music in the background.
‘What’s up?’ he says, then: ‘Hang on, got my girls here. I’m just going into another room where it’s a bit less shrieky.’
There’s a pause, then he comes back.
‘Yup?’
‘So I just had a really strange phone call from a landline,’ says Rose, ‘and I’d bet my last Cheesy Wotsit that it was Gregory Fuller on the phone.’
‘Oh yeah? What did he say?’
‘Nothing,’ says Rose. ‘That’s the thing. It was all a bit weird. But do you have numbers for the parents?’
‘I do,’ says Adam. ‘I’ll send them over. Hey, let me know once you’ve spoken to them, okay?’
Rose tries Gwen Fuller first, but it goes straight to a generic voicemail. She calls Anton Fuller. This time there’s a personalized message.
This is Anton Fuller. If your call relates to the Beamish School, please call 0208 333 2098 instead. Otherwise, leave a message after the tone.
What a pompous git he is. Even his disembodied voice winds Rose up.
She leaves a message for him and then stands in the middle of the kitchen, racked with indecision. Eyeing the sad pile of chopped vegetables, she moves over to the table and then back to the sink where she washes her hands, even though she doesn’t need to. The phone remains mute on the table.
Rose works out she’s only had about two sips of that wine.
It’s probably nothing. He’s a weird kid and his parents are likely playing the harp and reciting poetry; too busy to do anything as lowbrow as look at their phones in the evening.
But something is niggling at her and she knows she won’t be able to let it go. Briefly, she contemplates ringing Adam back. But she can’t pull him from an evening with his kids for a stupid ‘feeling’. No, she’ll just drive down there to be sure. Then she’ll come back and get on with what’s left of her own evening.
It’s bound to be nothing. If she’s quick, she could be drinking that glass of wine within an hour and a half.