LILY TRIES TO IGNORE THE sounds of Tom taking the sledgehammer to the walls, but it gets under her skin like a splinter from the bannister. She can feel the house resisting; she doesn’t know how, but she can.
‘Concentrate,’ she says, as she scatters the cut pieces in front of her. The words merge, cross-pollinating, making new connections. ‘ “Awkward relationships”, Bowie had called it.’ Lily is talking out loud consciously now, hearing her voice echoing round the room. Whenever Bean hears her voice, she flutters. Imagine what Bean will do if Lily really sings.
‘Sing’. That word comes up again and again. ‘Keep singing,’ her mum says in her card. ‘Maybe you will have the fortitude to sing out,’ Liliana says in the letter. But what should she sing? Doodling the Endgame maze has always helped her think, so she takes a pen and sets her hand free to draw.
She thinks of the aria that Mum sang, but there’s nothing in the sonnets to support it. She knows that she’s looking for a song. Just a simple song. She’s trying to connect the pieces. Turn them into constellations.
And then she sees it.
The words lie scattered like stars on the dark carpet.
‘iron’, ‘earth’, ‘stone’, ‘Winter’, ‘Bleak’, ‘water’, ‘long ago’
A descant of clues playing like a song. The song her mum sang. ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’.
And, in that moment, she knows she wants the house. But how will she win? She only has one of the twelve possible keys.
Keys. Twelve of them.
There are twelve possible keys in the major scale.
‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ in F Major.
Again, that tickle of déjà vu runs under her skin. She goes back through Liliana’s letter. And it’s repeated here, another mistake showing the way forward. ‘Cast those corsets of f. Major clues are hidden among the minor.’
F Major. The key of the song. Otherwise known as the tonic, from the ‘gin and tonic’ in the sonnet, or the root mentioned in the same one. Also known as the thing she wants most: home.
It all centres around the key of F Major. And maybe that’s the key everyone’s been looking for all along.
So, she has the key, but no door.
THWACK
The house shudders around her. She has to press on. She still needs the location of the secret room. Think.
She doodles the maze again, then remembers another part of the letter: Liliana told her to transpose those doodles onto the real world. At the time, Lily had dismissed it as another snark from Liliana about Lily’s designs, the kind of belittling that Sara knew well. But maybe it meant something else. The picture that she draws all the time, has always doodled to marshal her thoughts, is the maze. The maze that has been at the centre of her life. The maze that appears on every tablecloth, coaster, placemat, plate, cup, saucer, thimble even in the house. The answer could have been right there, in her peripheral vision, all through her life, and since she arrived. The maze.
Liliana has been pointing to it all along, giving Lily everything she needs to win. But how will that help her find the hidden room?
And then she remembers.
Lily snaps open the folder and takes out the blueprint of Endgame. The house and the maze are the same size. She closes her eyes. Placing a pen on the blueprint, at the front door, she takes herself through the maze in her mind’s eye and lets her pen follow. It twists and turns, and ends up in the hidden room where Lily hid, and Mariana died.
Leaving her pen on the page, Lily opens her eyes. The secret room of the maze maps onto the games room of the house. Of course, it does. It was always going to end in a game.
If she is going to get to the secret room before Tom destroys the house, she’ll have to get out. Her door, though, is locked, and Tom has the key. Think harder.
In her letter, Liliana said she wanted to give Lily a way out. And keys give protection and freedom. Lily goes through the pockets of her coat and takes out the key she found in the maze, and the one Gray had returned to her.
She places the first one in the keyhole. It fits. And then she tries her old key, the one that she wore round her neck as a child. And that fits too. She bets all of the keys fit. That could be how the figures entered her room. Lily wouldn’t have known she’d need more than a symbolic way out, but it doesn’t matter. Lily opens her door, and has her freedom.
Lily rushes out onto the landing. On the floor below, Tom is smashing through doors towards the back of Endgame. Lily reaches out and strokes the walls of the house. She’s sure it flexes to meet her hand.
The wind cries round the house as if to cause a distraction, covering her as she descends the stairs, avoiding every creaky tread. She must win this last game of hide-and-seek.
Reaching the games room, she looks around, feeling the ghosts of herself, Tom and Gray from only a few days ago pressing against the present. She sneezes, just as she did last time she was in here. Where would a secret room be hiding? She then remembers the cracks in the wall by the pinball machine.
Lily pulls at the legs of the machine, but it barely moves. She tries pushing it to one side, and that’s easier, but her hand slips, and presses the on button.
The pinball machine flashes and beeps into life. And that’s the only sound she hears. The steady cull of the sledgehammer has stopped. And now there are footsteps running down the stairs.
Lily pushes as hard as she can, knowing that she shouldn’t be doing this in her ‘condition’, but what else can she do? The pinball machine turns just enough for her to place a finger down a seam that runs down the wall.
Something clicks. And a door opens.
Lily blinks as she steps into a warm room filled with musical instruments. There’s an Irish harp, a drum kit, a worn cello, a harpsichord . . . and on the walls are pictures of Lily and her mum. So many photos. In one, they’re singing together, under the willow tree. This is the music room her mum always wanted, hidden away from conference goers and anyone else. A silent room of music.
A hand grabs her shoulder from behind. Tom pushes her as he rushes past, searching for the title deeds. Lily loses her footing and crashes into a timpani drum. The sound reverberates round the room and Lily then knows what to do.
She takes a deep breath, swallows, and, with her hand on her stomach, opens her mouth with the right key – the tonic, the home – of ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’.
Tom turns to her, eyes wide.
And then a door opens within the far wall of the music room. One secret room giving birth to another.
Isabelle Stirling ducks under the door frame and steps into the room, holding a folder. ‘And we have a winner,’ she says. ‘Lily Armitage, I declare you the owner of Endgame House.’
Tom reaches for his gun. He holds it out, inches away from Lily’s head.
A grey cat steps out from behind Isabelle, weaving round her ankles. Lily thinks she must be hallucinating, already dead.
Tom stares at the cat, ‘What the—’ and doesn’t see at first the figure in black rushing past Isabelle towards him, knocking him and the gun to the ground.
The figure bends and picks up Tom’s gun.
Mrs Castle pulls down her hood so Tom can see her face. And then shoots him.