Twenty minutes later, Astrid squirmed in the seat, fingers fidgeting with the seatbelt she wasn’t wearing.
‘What’s the name of the village where your house is?’
The sound of silence was interrupted by the rain bouncing off the car as he got them closer to their destination.
‘Pease Pottage.’ His eyes were fixed on the road.
‘How did a media studies degree help you become one of the country’s secret weapons, Frank? Did your intimate knowledge of British TV soaps make you a wiz at the Agency? Or was it your specialist knowledge of terrible Britpop music that got you the cosy desk and lifestyle?’
Astrid couldn’t control her thoughts, her mind rambling in all directions, heading towards images of Olivia and Lawrence until she pushed them towards her current saviour. Delaney ignored the questions.
‘It won’t be long now.’
They passed a motorway station, then on to Horsham Road. Delaney drove past a pub and stopped at the bottom of the street.
‘Don’t you live in London?’
Astrid couldn’t imagine having to do this commute twice a day.
‘This is the family home. Our parents lived here. And then Cara did after you dumped her.’
Astrid wondered at what point in their new partnership he’d stop reminding her of what had happened to his sister. She stared at his face, his inability or refusal to hide his hatred, and she understood he’d never stop reminding her.
They got out of the car, the early morning darkness transformed into the new day as the street lights sputtered at their arrival. Neighbourhood cats crept along the edges of the pavement, eyeing the visitors with scrunched faces and grave suspicion. Delaney strode up the drive, and they followed him.
Astrid glanced at Lee. ‘How are you feeling?’
Laurel forced a smile through her sleepy face, the tiredness evident on her weary features as eyes drooped and words dripped out in a querulous tremble.
‘Don’t worry; I’ll be fine.’
She didn’t look fine to Astrid. Laurel’s skin had lost its sheen as soon as Delaney rescued them, while the cut on her head had turned into a violent shade of purple around its edges.
The rain ceased pounding the land, leaving a bouquet of fresh water and dampness drifting around them. Some of nature’s tiniest creatures crawled along the ground and skittered into the muddy grass. Astrid gazed at the house through a fresh mist. It was separated from the others on the street, but had the same appearance as its concrete brothers and sisters: long and narrow with a garage on the side, it stretched back like a giant shoebox. It was three storeys high with a small attic at the top, a conservatory as an extension. Astrid glimpsed its dirty windows as they approached the door. The front garden was pierced with weeds, looking like the poor relation to its neighbours with wild bushes, impressive trees and vividly coloured flowers.
Delaney slipped the key in the lock and pushed the door open. It was the smell that hit Astrid first, an overpowering aroma of detergent and cleaning fluids. She couldn’t see anything clean as dust lay over every surface like grey snow. They stepped over a pile of mail cascading across the floor, a paper infestation ready to creep through the rest of the house. He threw his keys onto a side table and strode towards the kitchen.
‘Does anybody want a drink?’
Astrid helped Laurel inside, the younger woman unsteady on her feet. She put her arm around Lee’s waist and guided her towards a brown-coloured sofa.
‘How long is it since anybody lived here?’ she shouted towards Delaney in the kitchen. He returned, carrying a dirty glass and a half-full bottle of whisky.
‘Cara lived here, on and off before she went to Europe. This was our parents’ home before they died.’ He poured himself a full glass before downing most of it in one go.
Laurel shook her head. ‘Isn’t it a bit early for that?’
‘It helps me sleep.’ He refilled his glass.
Astrid scanned the room. ‘Do you have a laptop I can use?’
He pointed over her shoulder. ‘There’s one on the table behind you.’
‘Why was Cara in Europe?’ she asked him while holding onto Laurel’s waist.
He took a large drink from the glass, eyes pointing to a picture on the wall of a burly man on a fishing boat. The man in the photograph was an older black-and-white version of Frank, and she guessed he was the Delaney father.
‘She’d met somebody new, and they were going on holiday together.’ Astrid wanted to ask him if it was only a coincidence his sister was in Berlin while she was there. ‘She needed rest and recuperation.’
‘Which is what we need now,’ Astrid said to him.
He slumped into a chair opposite a TV from the 1970s and finished his second drink. ‘You can take the large room at the top of the stairs. Agent Lee can have the one next to it.’
‘And you?’
‘One more drink and I’ll be snoring in this chair. I need to get to work in three hours, or they’ll wonder where I am. There’s food in the kitchen, and I’ll bring some more when I return tonight. You need to stay inside and keep out of sight.’ His face looked about to collapse at any second.
‘And what happens then?’ Laurel kept on with the questions.
‘Then we start working out who’s behind all this.’
He propped the bottle on his corpulent stomach and closed his eyes. Astrid helped Laurel to stand and grabbed the computer from the table.
‘Come on; let’s see what luxury awaits us above.’
The stairs were to the left of the main room, short and narrow. She guided Laurel up, holding on to the rail and finding dust clinging to her skin. Laurel relaxed in her arm as they moved beyond the first bedroom and towards the one Delaney had described. She kicked the door open and sat Laurel onto a bed which didn’t appear to have been slept in for quite some time. It was the only piece of furniture there.
‘This must be Frank’s childhood room.’ Faded Nirvana and Blur posters hung from the walls, while stacked up in every corner were towers of collected memorabilia: records, CDs, videotapes, books and magazines. The layers of dust made Laurel sneeze loudly. ‘Do you want to get undressed?’
Laurel said no before lying down and pulling the covers up to her chin. ‘I’m fine.’
Astrid doubted it. ‘Try and get some sleep.’
She closed the door behind her. Down below, Frank Delaney’s snoring shook the dust from the ceiling. She headed into the bedroom, which was a kitsch nightmare of pink flamingo wallpaper, with paintings of cats knitting and dogs playing cards, and a carpet containing hundreds of small images of Vladimir Tretchikoff’s blue-faced Chinese Girl.
On the wall were a few framed family photos. She moved towards one, peering through the glass at a middle-aged couple and their two children: Cara and Frank and their parents. Cara must have only been five or six in the photo. She stood to one side as if placed there as an afterthought, peering from a sepia-toned past. Astrid turned her gaze to Cara’s mother in the photo, struck by how much the older woman resembled the grown-up daughter Astrid had pretended to love. Then she looked at the image of the young Cara. How responsible was she for her murder? Was faking an emotion the same as lying? Had Astrid’s deceit ruined Cara’s life?
She turned from the photo, her mind an explosive mixture of ideas falling into each other. The neon clock to her right said six-thirty in the morning. Her body demanded rest, but her mind requested sharpness while Delaney was downstairs. She’d only close her eyes once he’d left. If he was returning to the Agency, he’d have to leave by seven-thirty to beat the traffic and get to his desk before the working day started. She wouldn’t get any sleep before he left. He may have rescued her from Agency custody, but she didn’t trust him.
Astrid opened the laptop, glad the internet worked without any prompting for a password. The first thing she did was check the news sites for updates on the Reaper case, which all said the same: ongoing with no new leads. She touched her face, running fingers over her lips. Did she really want to do the next bit?
Of course, she did. She closed the news sites and brought up the most popular social media pages. It wasn’t hard to find her sister’s profile on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Courtney was married, but she’d kept her family name.
Was it because she loved Lawrence so much?
She stared at a recent photo of her older sibling; Courtney had his eyes and their mother’s face. In the image, she had the same grin Astrid remembered from when Courtney watched him beating her sister. Looking at the photo stabbed at her gut, a chunk of bile swirling around her like soap suds inside a hyperactive dishwasher. She forced her nails into her skin to stop her punching that irritating digital grin from the screen. Her head throbbed as if a thousand tiny Irish dancers were jigging inside her brain.
Contrary to popular belief, ADHD didn’t mean she couldn’t focus on things, but it meant she had a compulsion to gather up as much information as she could inside her head as a way of concentrating on specific issues. It was like piling wood on top of more wood to flatten the piece at the bottom; the more details in her head, the easier it became for her to isolate what was most important to her. She’d once described it to Cara as having a never-ending jigsaw inside her mind where, when she focused fully, the pieces would come together at some point, and everything would stretch out before her in perfect illumination.
Astrid returned to the computer screen, jagging her finger into Courtney’s pixelated head and flicking it to one side, moving through her sister’s interminable selfies. She couldn’t find any images of the mysterious husband or Olivia.
She was disappointed not to find any photos of her niece, but at least there weren’t any of her parents either. Courtney’s Twitter account was a banal litany of posts about trashy TV shows and D-list celebrities. Perhaps it was a good thing Olivia wasn’t on Courtney’s timeline. It was better not to have any pictures of the kid online, not with all the perverts lurking on the internet. Astrid had worked enough child abuse cases to recognise where the dangers lay. She pictured Olivia’s smiling face running around the playground once again.
I could hide in the shadows outside the nursery and get a glimpse of Olivia there tomorrow.
Large bellows rising like ash spewed from a petulant volcano erupted from downstairs and ripped that crazy idea from her head. Their host had awakened like the Kraken.
Astrid dragged herself from the bed. She crept towards the door, pressing her ear against the flaking wood and listened to Delaney moving around, hoping his noise wouldn’t wake Laurel. He spluttered and spewed for a bit longer, talking to himself, before she heard the unmistakable sound of him grasping his keys and leaving through the front door. She walked to the window, pulled back the chintzy orange-coloured curtains and peered through the glass, watching him get into the car and drive away.
She flopped onto the bed, finding respite in the comforting grip of the darkness. She formed an idea as to what she’d do next with Laurel and Frank.
But could she trust either of them to help her?