I fumble with my phone, finding recent calls and pressing Mark’s number as I tiptoe into the hall toward the stairs, Ella in my arms. I silently beseech her not to make a sound.
And then three things happen.
The crunch of gravel beneath feet becomes the solid tap of shoes on steps.
The tinny ringing of Mark’s phone at my ear is mirrored by a louder version coming from outside the house.
And the front door opens.
When Mark walks into the house, his ringing mobile still in his hand, he finds me standing in the hall, wild-eyed and high from the adrenaline coursing through my veins.
“You rang, m’lady?” He grins and taps his phone to end the call.
Slowly, I lower my own mobile from my ear, my heart rate refusing to accept that the danger has passed. I laugh awkwardly, relief making me as light-headed as fear did a moment ago.
“I heard someone walking around outside. I thought they wanted to get in.”
“Someone did. Me.” Mark comes forward to kiss me, Ella sandwiched between us. He drops a kiss on our daughter’s forehead, then takes her from my arms.
“You were creeping about. Why didn’t you come straight in?” My irritated tone is unfair, a by-product of the panic slowly dissipating through my bloodstream.
Mark tilts his head to one side and surveys me with more patience than my shortness merits. “I was putting the bins out. It’s collection day tomorrow.” He addresses Ella in a singsong voice. “Isn’t it? Yes, it is!”
I squeeze my eyes closed for a beat. The dragging noise that might have been a ladder. The thud of the door to the trash can shed. Noises so familiar I should have known instantly what they were. I follow Mark into the sitting room, where he turns on the lights and settles Ella in her beanbag chair.
“Where’s Laura?”
“I sent her home.”
“She said she’d stay! I’d have come back earlier—”
“I don’t need a babysitter. I’m fine.”
“Are you?” He takes each of my hands in his and holds my arms wide. I wriggle away from his inspection.
“Yes. No. Not really.”
“So where’s this card?”
“The police have got it.” I show him the same photos I showed Laura and watch him zoom in on the writing. He reads aloud.
“Suicide? Think again.”
“You see? My mother was murdered.”
“That’s not what it says, though.”
“But that’s the implication, isn’t it?”
Mark looks at me thoughtfully. “Alternatively, it was an accident.”
“An accident?” My incredulity is clear. “Why not just say that, then? Why the sinister message? The tacky card?”
Mark sits down with a long sigh that I think—I hope—is less about me and more about having spent the day in a stuffy classroom. “Perhaps someone’s trying to point the finger. Negligence rather than a deliberate act. Who’s responsible for maintaining the cliff edges?”
I say nothing, and when he continues, his voice is softer.
“You see what I mean, though; it’s ambiguous.”
“I suppose it is. Except Mum left her handbag and phone on the edge of the cliff, which would be a weird thing to happen accidentally as you fell . . .”
“Unless she’d put them down first. So she didn’t drop them. She was looking over the edge, or trying to rescue a bird, and the edge crumbled, and—”
I sit down heavily next to Mark. “Do you really think it was an accident?”
He twists around so we’re facing each other. When he speaks, it’s gentle, and he keeps his eyes trained on mine. “No, sweetheart. I think your mum was desperately unhappy after your dad died. I think she was more unwell than anyone could have known. And”—he pauses, making sure I’m listening—“I think she took her own life.”
Nothing he’s saying is new to me, yet my heart drops back into my stomach and I realize how much I wanted his alternative narrative to be true. How ready I am to grab on to a lifeline that hasn’t even been thrown.
“All I’m saying is that everything’s open to interpretation. Including this card.” He puts my phone facedown on the coffee table, the photos obscured. “Whoever sent it wants to mess with your head. They’re sick. They want a reaction. Don’t give it to them.”
“The man at the police station put it in an evidence bag. He said they’d check for fingerprints.” They’re taking it seriously, I want to add.
“Did you see a detective?”
“No, just the man who works on the front desk. He was a detective for most of his service, and when he retired he came back as a civilian.”
“That’s dedication.”
“It is, isn’t it? Imagine loving your job so much you don’t want to leave it. Even after you’ve retired.”
“Or you’re so institutionalized you can’t imagine doing anything else?” Mark yawns, his hand too late to catch it. From the front, his teeth are a perfect pearly white, but from this angle I can see the amalgam fillings in his upper molars.
“Oh. I hadn’t looked at it that way.” I think of Murray Mackenzie with his careful concern and insightful comments, and whatever the reason, I’m glad he’s still working for the police. “Anyway, he was lovely.”
“Good. In the meantime, the best thing you can do is put it out of your mind.” He scoots to the corner of the sofa, his legs stretched out, and raises one arm in invitation. I slide into our well-worn position, snuggled under his left arm with his chin resting lightly on the top of my head. He smells of cold air and something I can’t quite pinpoint . . .
“Have you been smoking?” I’m curious, that’s all, but even I can hear the judgment that lies beneath the surface of my words.
“A couple of drags, after we finished. Sorry, do I stink?”
“No, I . . . I just didn’t know you smoked.” Imagine not knowing your partner smokes . . . But I’ve never seen him with a cigarette. Never even heard him mention it.
“I quit years ago. Hypnotherapy. It’s what made me go into counseling, actually. Have I not told you this story? Anyway, every few months I light one, have a few drags, then stub it out. It reminds me I’m the one in control.” He grins. “There’s logic to it, I promise. And don’t worry—I would never do it around Ella.”
I settle back into him. I tell myself it’s exciting that we’re still discovering things about each other—what we have in common; what sets us apart—but right now mystery isn’t what I need in my life. I wish Mark and I knew each other inside out. That we’d been childhood sweethearts. I wish he’d known me before Mum and Dad died. I was a different person then. Curious. Amused. Amusing. Mark doesn’t know that Anna. He knows bereaved Anna; pregnant Anna; Anna the mother. Sometimes, when Laura or Billy is around, I’ll lose myself in a time before Mum and Dad died, and I’ll feel like the old me again. It doesn’t happen often enough.
I change the subject. “How was your course?”
“Lots of role-play.” I hear him grimace. He hates that sort of thing.
“You’re later than I thought you’d be.”
“I dropped by the flat. I don’t like leaving it empty.”
When Mark and I met he was living in Putney. He saw clients in a room of his seventh-floor apartment and spent one day each week at a practice in Brighton—the same practice that distributed flyers around Eastbourne at the very moment I most needed it.
I told Laura about the pregnancy test before I broke the news to Mark.
“What am I going to do?”
“Have a baby, I guess.” Laura grinned. “Isn’t that how it usually works?”
We were sitting in a café in Brighton, opposite the nail bar where Laura used to work. She’d found a new job taking customer calls for an online shopping company, but I saw her looking at the girls laughing in the nail bar and wondered if she was missing the banter.
“I can’t have a baby.” It didn’t feel real. I didn’t feel pregnant. No nausea, no sore breasts . . . If it wasn’t for the half dozen tests I’d done, and the absence of a period, I’d have sworn it was all a bad dream.
“There are other options.” Laura spoke softly, even though there was no one else within earshot.
I shook my head. Two lives lost were already too many.
“Well, then.” She held up her coffee mug in a mock toast. “Congratulations, Mummy.”
I told Mark over dinner that night. I waited till the tables around us were full, protected by the company of strangers.
“I’m sorry,” I said when I’d dropped my bombshell. There was a flicker of confusion on his face.
“Sorry? This is amazing! I mean . . . isn’t it?” He scrutinized me. “You don’t think so?” He tried to be serious, but a slow grin was spreading across his face, and he looked around the restaurant as though expecting a round of applause from our oblivious dining companions.
“I . . . I wasn’t sure.” But I put my hand on my still-flat stomach and thought that after the awfulness of the previous year, here was something good. Something miraculous.
“Okay, so it’s maybe a little faster than we might have wanted—”
“Just a bit.” I could count the weeks we had been together on my fingers.
“—but it is what we wanted.” He looked for agreement and I nodded vehemently. It was. We’d even talked about it, surprising ourselves with our candor. Mark was thirty-nine when we met, bruised from a long-term relationship he’d thought was permanent, and resigned to the possibility that he might never have the family he wanted. I was only twenty-five, but painfully aware of how short life was. My parents’ deaths had brought us together; this baby would provide the glue to keep us there.
Gradually Mark wound down his London-based business and scaled up his Brighton one, moving in with me and renting out the Putney flat. It seemed the perfect solution. The rent covered his mortgage, plus a little extra, and the tenants seemed happy to fix anything that went wrong. Or so we’d thought, until a call from environmental health informed us the upstairs neighbor had complained about a smell. By the time we got there the tenants had left with their deposit and a month’s rent owing, leaving the place trashed too badly to rent out straightaway. Mark was gradually putting things back together.
“How’s it looking?”
“Grim. I’ve lined up someone to decorate but they’re on another job till mid-January, so it’ll be February before there’s a chance of a deposit from new tenants.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does.”
We fall silent, neither looking for an argument. We don’t need the rental income. Not now. We’re not short of a bob or two, as Granddad Johnson would have said.
I’d hand back every penny if it meant one more day with my parents, but the bottom line is: their deaths left me solvent. Thanks to Granddad Johnson, the house has never been mortgaged, and a combination of Dad’s savings and my parents’ life insurance policies means that sitting in my bank account right now is a fraction over one million pounds.
“I’ll sell the flat.”
“Why? This is bad luck, that’s all. Switch agencies—find one that checks out references better.”
“Maybe we should sell both places.”
For a second I don’t register what he’s suggesting. Sell Oak View?
“It’s a big house, and the garden’s a lot to maintain, when neither of us knows what we’re doing.”
“We’ll get a gardener.”
“The Sycamore went on the market for eight fifty, and it’s only four bedrooms.”
He’s serious. “I don’t want to move, Mark.”
“We could buy somewhere together. Something that belongs to us both.”
“Oak View does belong to us both.”
Mark doesn’t answer, but I know he doesn’t agree. He moved in properly at the end of June, when I was four months pregnant and Mark hadn’t spent a night at his flat in weeks.
“Make yourself at home,” I said cheerily, but the very fact that I’d said it reinforced my ownership. It was days before he stopped asking if he could make a cup of tea; weeks before he stopped sitting bolt upright on the sofa, like a visitor.
I wish he loved the house the way I do. With the exception of my three years at uni, I have only ever lived here. All of my life is within these four walls.
“Just think about it.”
I know he thinks there are too many ghosts here. That sleeping in my parents’ old bedroom is hard for me. Perhaps it’s hard for him, too. “Maybe.”
But I mean no. I don’t want to move. Oak View is all I have left of my parents.
Ella wakes at six on the dot. Six A.M. used to be early, but when you’ve been through weeks of night wakings and resigned yourself to starting your day at five, six A.M. feels like a lie-in. Mark makes tea and I bring Ella into bed with us, and we have an hour as a family before Mark has his shower and Ella and I go down for breakfast.
Half an hour later Mark’s still in the bathroom—I hear the clanging of the pipes and the rhythmic knocking that provide the musical accompaniment to our en suite shower. Ella is dressed, but I’m still in my pajamas, dancing around the kitchen to make her laugh.
The crunch of gravel outside makes me think of yesterday evening. As the morning light creeps into the kitchen, I’m embarrassed by the way I worked myself into a state. I’m relieved Robert’s phone was switched off, making Mark the only witness to my paranoia. Next time I’m alone at night I’ll play loud music, turn on lights, walk through the house slamming doors. I won’t cower in one room, creating a drama that doesn’t need to exist.
I hear the metallic snap of the letterbox, the soft thud of letters dropping onto the mat beneath, and then the lightest of finger taps that tells me the postman has left something in the porch.
When Ella was five weeks old and full of colic, the postman delivered a textbook Mark had ordered. It had taken me a full hour to settle her and she had finally dropped off to sleep when the postman banged the door knocker with such force the light fixtures rattled. I wrenched open the door in a sleep-deprived, postnatal rage, giving the poor man both barrels, and then some. Afterward, when my fury had burned itself out and my cries no longer rivaled Ella’s, the postman suggested he might simply leave further packages outside the door, with no danger of disturbing us. It appeared mine was not the only house on his round at which this was the preferred modus operandi.
I wait until his footsteps leave our drive, not wanting to greet him in my pajamas, and still mortified by my tears that day; then I pad into the hall and collect the post. Circulars, more bills, an official-looking letter in a buff envelope for Mark. I take the key from its hook beneath the windowsill and unlock the front door. It sticks a little, and I pull hard to open it.
But it isn’t the force of opening the door that makes me take a step back, or the icy cold sucked instantly into the warm hall. It isn’t the parcel that rests on the pile of logs to one side of the porch.
It’s the blood smeared across the threshold, and the pile of entrails on the top step.