9

Not dead, dormant: Jessie stares at the bulb between her soil-hardened fingertips. A gusty November wind, smelling distinctly of the orchard’s rotting windfalls, pushes against her back. And she wonders. She wonders about the other thing lying dormant at Applecote, waiting for the right conditions to come alive.

The problem is she knows now. She wishes she didn’t. She wishes she’d let Audrey be.

But these last two and a half months, since Bella started school and Will his disorienting split Applecote/London life, Bella’s not stopped muttering about the “vanishing girl.” She particularly likes talking about it when Will is away during the week and it’s just the three of them alone in the house, surrounded by a darkness so absolute it is like tangible living matter. It started to spook Jessie a bit, so a couple of weeks ago she decided to prove the whole thing was nonsense, once and for all.

She was heartened by a quick search online that came up with nothing. But then, just to be sure, she’d gone on to chat with Sheila, the nice lady behind the till in the village shop—Sheila had been proudly saying she’d been born in the village, only visited London once, which was enough. Jessie casually asked if she knew anything about a young girl who had gone missing from Applecote in the fifties. She fully expected Sheila to laugh, ask her what on earth she was talking about.

“Never forgot the day my mammy told me,” Sheila muttered instead, stuffing noodles more vigorously into Jessie’s basket. “We weren’t allowed out to play for months that summer.” She shook her head. “That poor Mrs. Wilde.”

“But not the Mrs. Wilde who lived at Applecote before us?” Jessie clarified with a delayed smile.

She had to sit down on the bench by the village pond afterward, bury her face in Romy’s cloud of biscuity curls. That night she dreamed of the woman with the dogs again, and called out, “Audrey!” and the woman turned around, revealing no face inside the head scarf, just a smudge. She’s dreamed it every night since.

Jessie hasn’t told Bella what Sheila said, of course. Bella needs no more encouragement. Rather than growing bored with the story, she seems more obsessed than ever, layering the bare “facts” with her own details and suppositions, like one of those dark Internet memes Jessie’s read about. Jessie hopes the Audrey story is Bella’s way of getting herself noticed, trying to fit in, egged on by the other Squirrels girls. But Bella won’t leave the story at school.

Bella’s portrait of Audrey—a rather good collage of a girl with a toothpaste smile, a background of rolling newspaper print—is now stuck on their kitchen wall, next to Romy’s innocent finger paintings. And on Bella’s dressing table, that eerie memento mori keeps growing: the heart-shaped button, the paperweight from the desk in the old drawing room, those disintegrating newspapers from ’59, joined this week by a stubby pencil with the faintest A on its hexagonal side that Bella found wedged under the baseboard. Jessie secretly wishes she could throw the whole lot in the fire. (In hindsight, she also wishes she’d never given Romy those alphabet bricks from the attic, or fixed up the child’s high chair.) Will sees no harm in Bella’s interest—“a teen thing, like collecting badges,” but, then, Jessie hasn’t told Will what Sheila said yet, either.

She tried. But the words caught, and she washed them away with a large gulp of red wine. Jessie’s overwhelming instinct is to protect Will from further darkness, not to add to his growing troubles. As it is, there are Skype meetings in the small hours with Jackson in Brisbane that leave Will permanently exhausted. Two business deals have been toasted in the last month, then disastrously fallen through at the last minute, Will’s hopes dashed, his professional pride dented. The company’s staff is unsettled, a couple jumping ship. Last week there was an embarrassing, expensive cock-up, a cargo turning up in the wrong port.

Will takes it all too personally, as if this no-deal limbo is a failure of his as a businessman and, Jessie senses, a husband. However much she assures him it’s not his fault—it’s the nervous markets, the lack of accessible capital, just crap luck—Will seems increasingly distant and introspective. (Jessie is struggling not to take this personally and see her inability to lift his somber mood as a reflection on the shortcomings of their relationship. She’s sure Mandy would have known how to reach him.) Given all this, she simply cannot bring herself to tell Will about Applecote’s grim past and risk him seeing Applecote not as a rural haven but as a house of horrors. She’s terrified he may want to leave. So she lets Will dismiss Bella’s story as a schoolgirl’s tall tale and desperately hopes it will all gently fade away, like one season turning into another.

And yet. The house’s history certainly explains things. The resistance of local builders—thank God for Joe Peat, who has agreed to work at Applecote, albeit in a vague “few weeks.” The minute flickers in villagers’ faces when Jessie mentions where she lives. The way a couple of the mothers at the local church playgroup in the village hall exchanged the sort of uneasy complicit look that wonders if the other should mention anything. Jessie felt a little like she had outsider crayoned on her forehead. She’s just grateful that she hasn’t mentioned anything to the woman at the plant nursery café: she still has one little sanctuary with good cake, like Greta’s in London, where Applecote’s history won’t follow her. She needs it.

During the week now, whole days can pass when she doesn’t see another adult. Her thoughts loosen and slip away then, especially if she has to go into Bella’s bedroom, where those love letters still flutter in the eaved shadows like silver moths and Mandy’s beautiful, accomplished gaze mocks her from the walls. What did we do in our past lives to be so blessed? Those words still taunt her. As does the image of them holding hands in their sleep, especially given that she and Will spend most of the week in separate beds, over seventy miles apart. All the niggles and natural fears Jessie’s ever had about Will—the speed of their relationship, the fact he’d loved someone else so deeply, that Bella still doesn’t accept her, probably never will—take on a life of their own in the strange lilac light of that room.

Afterward, seeking reassurance, she’ll phone Will just to hear his voice. Although Jessie can’t picture the house, room, or chair in which he sits—she hates this—she can hear the police sirens in the background, the murmur of the city, and she will smell the traffic, the surging scented gusts from shop fronts, and she will picture dear Lou on a tube beneath the city’s concrete crust, applying her deep-black MAC mascara, and she will miss it all with a pang that is almost painful, and bring the conversation to a sharp close, in case she gives herself away or starts to sound like a sitcom stereotype of the needy, emotionally unstable wife at home.

Alone in the house, followed by Mandy’s Mona Lisa gaze, these uncorrected thoughts gather plausibility until Friday, D-day, the day Will returns. Friday is always busy. It is the day Jessie primps the house, fueled by a manic energy that turns her into a woman she doesn’t really recognize: flowers arranged, bread baked, roaring fires lit. No longer the start of a lazy slide toward Sunday, as they used to be, Applecote weekends must now justify themselves. She feels under pressure for it all to be worth it, the exhausting commute, the upheaval, the cold and mud. She’ll scrub the soil from beneath her fingernails and—the image of perfectly presented Mandy never far from her mind—rummage around for something faintly chic to wear.

“I wouldn’t bother, Jess. I’m sure he’d much rather just get laid,” Lou counsels on the phone. Jessie loyally doesn’t tell Lou that that side of things is stalling. How sometimes, when she and Will embrace, they don’t seem to fit together as they used to, as if they are physically changing shape in the days they are apart.

Anyway, it’s about the girls now, not her, she tells herself. They miss him terribly, the absent hero. (Bella, in particular, takes it out on Jessie, since she is around to receive it.) Romy launches herself at Will in a frenzy of possessive delight the moment he walks through the door. After hugs, tickles, a nonsensical discussion about Boy, the unfortunate roly-poly Romy keeps as a pet in a jam jar, Will dutifully retreats upstairs to spend time alone with Bella in her bedroom. Jessie encourages it, as she always has. It’s only sometimes, after particularly long chats, when Will comes downstairs looking preoccupied, a little troubled, like he did last night, that Jessie feels the hollow pang of exclusion and starts to wonder exactly what Bella is telling him about the week alone with her stepmother.

But she says nothing. She carries on cooking. She smiles, maybe a little dementedly at times. She reminds herself that her policy is to share nothing that could stress Will. She might lay it on a bit too thick: how Bella’s making such nice friends (Jessie pounces on any mention of a fellow classmate being “kind of all right” as evidence of a blossoming friendship) and Romy loves the playgroup (she wrestles tractors out of the boys’ hands, then demands to go home). She makes light of Bella’s sleepwalking, not mentioning how she found Bella by Romy’s cot again a couple of nights ago, staring down at the snuffling lump of her little sister with cold, blank, unseeing eyes. She doesn’t talk about her own irrational wake-in-the-night fear that Romy will disappear, like the girl who lived here all those years ago; that old houses, set in such ancient landscapes, create atavistic reflexes, recirculate the past, and that bad things will always happen at Applecote, just as Bella once promised.

“Dad!” Bella shouts into her thoughts. Jessie looks up, surprised to find herself still standing in the flower bed, an allium bulb in her hand, the planting hole empty. This keeps happening, this fleeting loss of herself. Like she might have dissolved into the very substance of the house and garden while Will was away.

The light has changed, bronze now.

“Have you seen him, Jessie?” Bella is standing by the orangery, long hair blowing about her face, arms tightly crossed, wearing her Saturday uniform of skinny jeans, sneakers, and a sloppy hoodie.

“Sorry, miles away. Yes, yes, he’s taken Romy to the village pond to feed the ducks.” Jessie likes how this sentence sounds, normal, domestic, like they’re a regular country family enjoying their weekend. “He won’t be long.”

To Jessie’s surprise, Bella starts to walk in her direction across the veranda, its stone still black from the morning’s downpour. “What are you doing?” she asks curiously.

“Planting flowers for spring.” Jessie straightens, presses a hand on her aching lower back. “We may not have a new roof by then. But we will have flowers. Far more important, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Is that a shallot?”

“An allium bulb. Close though. Same family.”

Bella sticks her hands in her jeans’ pockets, raises her shoulders into a shrug. “Doesn’t look like it’ll do anything,” she says flatly.

“Why don’t you plant it and see? It’s a bit late in the season. But the man at the nursery said it should be fine if we get them in this weekend. It’s a cool little nursery; I wish you’d come with me one day.”

Bella rolls her eyes. “Nurseries are never cool, Jessie. You’ve been in the country too long.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Jessie laughs. She picks the paper bag of bulbs from the ground and hands it to Bella. “There’s another trowel in that bag.”

Bella hesitates, then, resignedly deciding she has nothing better to do, she takes the bulbs and the trowel, bends down, and flicks at the soil.

Jessie tries not to look too pleased. Nothing scares Bella off faster. “About ten centimeters deep . . . that’s it. That’s great. Shove the bulb in. No, other way. Pointy bit facing up. Then just fill it in. Well done.”

It’s an incongruous sight, Bella squatting down, carefully digging tiny holes, dropping in bulb after bulb, entirely absorbed, nudging them into place with her fingers. After a while, she stops and frowns up thoughtfully at Jessie. “Mum never gardened.”

“No, I guess she didn’t,” says Jessie after a pause. It hits her that there is now a heartbreakingly long list of things that Bella will never do with Mandy. She’d like to be able to acknowledge her understanding of this somehow to Bella but deems it too risky.

Bella starts digging once more, stabbing the trowel deep into the earth until it collides with something. “Oh. Look.”

She wipes a muddy pair of glasses on her jeans. The lenses are long gone, one arm, too, the frame tortoiseshell where she rubs the mud away. She forces the remaining arm open, holds the spectacles up, and peers though them. They have a cat’s-eye slant, giving her a definite 1950s air. The sun dips. Jessie feels a little breathless, as if the house is confronting her with its darkest secret, the one she’s kept from Will.

She knows what’s coming.

“The vanishing girl, the one you hate me talking about. They could be hers, couldn’t they?”

“I don’t . . .” Jessie’s words trail off at the terrible timing: Will is pushing through the side gate, Romy on his shoulders, Flump, her knitted elephant, bobbing on his head.

“Ladies.” He bends down to shimmy Romy off his shoulders, grinning, pleased at this rare scene of familial harmony. “Looking like a natural, Bella.”

“Jessie made me do it,” Bella says, fighting a small smile. Will slings his arm around Bella, hugs her to him.

Jessie notices that Will is wearing his life in layers today: a puffer coat muddied from carrying his midlife toddler; the V-neck cashmere sweater her mother gave him last Christmas (she’d never spent so much on a sweater in her life); a faded Glastonbury T-shirt from 1998, a festival he’d go to with Mandy, and the year Bella was conceived.

“Ah, Jessie can be persuasive,” says Will wryly to Bella.

“You’re back quick. Weren’t the ducks hungry?” Jessie doesn’t mean to sound short. She picks at Romy’s curls. They’re beginning to dreadlock at the back. She looks increasingly feral, like some sort of woodland sprite. A free spirit—“A little too free?” Will wondered yesterday after getting home—Romy is resentful of any constraints: buggies, playpens, and warm clothes. She knows her own mind, her favored routes through the garden, all the better barefoot, the places to forage in the undergrowth, finding a brain-like walnut in the skull of its broken shell, rabbit bones that she offers to Bella, trying to win her affection. She eyes the glasses in Bella’s hand curiously.

“Sorry,” Will says distractedly, looking up from his phone. His eyes take a moment to refocus, the pupils contracting, as if he’s moving from one place to another in his head. “An e-mail from Jackson. Says he’s sniffed out another potential buyer, some friend of a friend in the City. Maybe this will finally be it, Jess? I need to make a call.”

“On a Saturday?” Jackson’s “potential buyers” have led them in a dance so far.

“If there’s a small chance, we can’t sit on it, Jessie.” Stuffing his phone back in his coat pocket, he glances at Bella’s hand. Jessie’s heart sinks; she’d hoped they might go unnoticed. “What’ve you got there, Bella?”

“Audrey’s glasses.” Bella lays them flat on her palm and holds them up for Will’s inspection.

Will sends Jessie a quizzical look. She sends a small shrug back, one that says, Leave it, it’s just Bella’s fanciful imagination.

“Ducks?” Romy presses against Bella’s leg, smiling the kind of smile that would melt any heart—just not her sister’s. “Bell Bell take Romy to the ducks?”

“Bella’s busy, sweetpea.” Jessie smiles, scooping her up. But Romy is resistant. She wants Bella.

“No, it’s all right, I’ll take Romy,” says Bella unexpectedly.

Jessie is so taken aback, she can’t think of anything to say at first.

“Will you?” Will looks pleasantly surprised.

“Sure. We’ll find some ducks on the river.”

The river. Jessie’s heart starts to thump. Bella cannot take Romy down to the water alone. She thinks of the cold, threatening way Bella looks at Romy sometimes. Bella’s hot temper, her unpredictability. Jessie scrabbles about for legitimate reasons, the ones she can voice out loud. “Oh no, she’s such a scamp. She keeps running off and hiding, Bella.”

And this is true. A trying new phase, Romy’s attempts at hide-and-seek. Usually Jessie finds her pretty quickly. But she wouldn’t want Romy trying it on by the river, not with that swell of dark water edging up the bulrushes, its surface fingerprinted with swirling eddies, guilty-looking. A bloated dead sheep was bobbing downstream yesterday, like an overstuffed pillowcase, its eyes pink holes, pecked out by birds. “The river is very high after all the rain. And look at those clouds. It’s going to bucket down.”

“We’ll be fine.” Bella speaks directly to Will now. And Jessie is aware of the self-enclosed lock of their gazes, the way they are silently negotiating without her.

“Off we go!” Romy tucks Flump tighter under her arm. “Romy and Bell Bell and Flump.”

“Will,” Jessie appeals to him, trying to talk in a grown-up code that Bella won’t understand. “I’m really not sure it’s such a good idea.”

“She means she doesn’t trust me,” Bella interjects simply, understanding perfectly.

Will frowns. Jessie feels the day lurch, the first afternoon of the weekend, which was going so well. “I . . .”

“I told you, Dad,” Bella adds.

What has she told him? When? Jessie glances at Will. Is this what they were talking about last night in Bella’s bedroom? Those long phone calls earlier in the week? But Will doesn’t quite meet Jessie’s eye. And something in Jessie sinks: she cannot tune in to Will as she did, she realizes. Is he thinking of what happened in London at the pool? Because she is. She can’t not.

The lifeguard saw Bella holding the girl under the water, the girl struggling, flailing. After he pulled her out—Zizzi Miles, cliquey, popular, an old adversary of Bella’s—she gasped on the poolside like a dying fish. An ambulance was called. Zizzi emerged from the incident unscathed, Bella far less so. After Zizzi swore that Bella “had gone pyscho” and tried to drown her and Zizzi’s incensed parents called the police, Bella was suspended, her place in the sixth form revoked. Offered the chance to defend herself, she barely bothered, only saying that she wished she’d pushed down harder and that Zizzi’s drowning act was faked: “I don’t expect to be believed.” And the headmistress didn’t believe her. But Will did. And Jessie tried to. It’s just that there’s always been this little doubtful voice in Jessie’s head. No, Bella shouldn’t be in charge of the little sister she doesn’t like very much down by that river.

“Bella will be super careful, won’t you?” Jessie hears Will say. And before she can object, she sees Will pull a sandwich bag of bread crumbs from his coat pocket. “Here. Duck feast. Hold Rom’s hand, Bella. Tightly.”

“And Flump’s,” instructs Romy, pushing the elephant’s knitted foot into Bella’s fingers.

Will is talking in his fast London voice while Jessie paces by the kitchen window, peering out of the glass at the darkening garden beyond. The yellow tinge has gone. The sky is heavy, metallic, like a lid. She waits for Will to finish his call, turns to him. “They’ve been gone awhile.”

“Twenty minutes.” He’s looking at her in a funny way, holding her at a distance. “Bella can handle Romy.”

“It’s not a London park, Will.” Worry makes her sound too sharp. Besides, he doesn’t know the river, or the girls’ dynamic, not like she does. He’s never here. “No one’s around. If anything happened . . .”

Will rakes back his hair and says wearily, “I thought we moved here so the girls could roam free.”

His tone takes her by surprise. It seems that a criticism of the entire move is seeded in his question. Rain starts to tap at the window, the sound of little fingers. “Romy hasn’t got her waterproof.”

“That’s never held her back before.”

Jessie’s not sure if there’s an accusation in there somewhere, too, or if she’s imagining it. Maybe he’s just tired and scratchy. “I can feel another storm coming.”

He follows her into the cloakroom, watching as she rifles frantically through the coats on the hooks, her heart starting to jack, her mind flying off to frightening places. “Jessie . . .” he says more softly.

“Not now, Will.”

He leans his head against the door frame. “I was just going to say how sweet you and Bella looked together in the garden just then, that’s all.”

“Oh,” she says, momentarily thrown. Normally she’d seize upon this, evidence of how everything’s working out just fine. “Well, I won’t be long.”

The wind pushes her through the meadow, as if it wants her to get to the river faster. It’s hard to see in the rain: the stones are battered gray shapes, the trees at the meadow’s edge sodden slabs of orange.

The river slurps at the bank, breaching in places, blades of grass sticking up surreally under a couple of inches of water. She runs alongside it, peering through the blackened bulrushes. They’re not here, she thinks, her stomach flipping. They’re bloody well not here. She starts calling their names, skidding on the cattle-hoofed mud. There’s no one around, just the eerie desolation of a river in the rain, a red kite circling above. She stands for a moment, hand covering her mouth, not knowing what to do.

Shadows appear just beneath the surface of the water, like they did in the pool that first day. A corner of an old red shopping bag looks, for a moment, like Romy’s welly boot, and a choke of fear rushes up her throat. She calls their names again, louder now. Nothing. She’ll phone Will. She must phone Will. But her phone is not in her back pocket. Her phone is on the kitchen table, of course, where she left it. She stops, panting, hands on her knees, tries to think rationally. She must return. Maybe they’re back at the house now. Yes, that’s where they have to be.

Turning back to the meadow, Jessie freezes.

Ahead, her outline smudged by an undulating curtain of rain and wind, is a little girl, tiny, huddled on one of the stones, wearing glasses.

Romy hasn’t seen Jessie yet, not until she calls her name, runs up and grabs her tightly as if pulling her back from the edge of a cliff. “Oh, sweetheart.”

“Flump gone,” sobs Romy, tightening her arms around Jessie’s neck. “Bell Bell gone.”

“Gone? Where? Why are you wearing those horrible glasses? Oh, you poor little thing. Let’s put this on before you get any wetter.”

She whips the glasses off Romy, stuffing them into her pocket, and tries in vain to push Romy’s wet arms into her anorak. Out of the corner of her eye, movement. And there is Bella, out of breath, as if she’s run back from somewhere far away, hair falling in black blades across her face.

“Bella! Where were you?”

Bella holds up Flump, the knitted elephant’s sodden ears flopping pathetically. “I went to find this. Don’t look at me like that. She dropped it. I told her to stay there while I went looking. I’ve only been five minutes or so.”

“Five minutes!”

“Flump was hard to find in the grass,” Bella retorts defensively. She shoots Romy a cold look. “I knew she’d keep whining if I didn’t come back with it.”

“Your dad told you to hold Romy’s hand!”

“By the river. He said hold her hand by the river.”

“The river is just there. It’s there! A toddle away. Romy could have gone looking for you and fallen in.” All the times Jessie’s swallowed her anger, her fear, her doubts, seem to rise up at once, and she keeps shouting, even though she should stop, she knows she should stop, and Bella is paling, her blazing eyes darting about like something trapped. Then she is stumbling away over the soggy tussocks of grass.

“Wait!” Jessie runs after her, Romy sobbing on her hip. She pulls the glasses out of her pocket. “And why did you make her wear these? Tell me.”

A guilty-looking flush rises on Bella’s cheeks as she stutters, “She . . . she wanted to wear them, didn’t you, Romy?”

“Don’t like.” Romy pushes the glasses away and buries her head into Jessie’s shoulder. Jessie cradles her protectively.

“She does. I was just being nice. Is that so hard to imagine?” Bella grabs the glasses back.

Jessie hugs Romy closer. Something doesn’t fit. For all Romy’s sense of adventure, she wouldn’t have wanted to be left alone in the rain like that. And she’d have protested about it. A small suspicious voice in Jessie’s head starts to wonder if Bella, consciously or not, deliberately put Romy in danger. “I don’t like the sound of this.”

“No, you don’t like me.”

“That’s simply not true. I . . . I . . .” Jessie is suddenly shocked by it all, the force of her own reaction, how a Saturday afternoon could have begun so sweetly and slid into this. She presses her hand to her forehead. “Sorry. I’m sorry for shouting. We need to get you some help, Bella. I . . . I will get you what you need, I promise.”

Bella fists the tears off her face. “I need Mum back, don’t you get it? And I need you gone. No more shrinks. No more talking. No more Romy this and Romy fucking that. Just me and Dad again.”

Romy starts to whimper.

“Let’s . . . let’s just stop, Bella. Please. Not here. Let’s go back to the house. We’ll talk it through.”

“There’s nothing else to say. I’ve said the truth. It’s out there now. Do what you like with it.” Bella turns, walks off, bent forward in the rain, wild, elemental, completely out of Jessie’s control.

“Bella . . .” Jessie calls weakly, blinking back tears. But her voice is sucked away by the wind. She knows she should run after her, persuade her to come back to the house, warm up by the fire, but she can’t erase the image of Romy in the spectacles, sitting on the stone like a sacrificial offering. So she lets Bella vanish into the violent rain.

Almost two hours now. Where is she? Jessie listens with mounting alarm to the sound of branches breaking, great limbs crashing to the ground outside, static things airborne, benign things gone rogue, a world spun upside down. She prays for Bella’s quick return.

The clock ticks faster on the kitchen wall, stacking up the missing minutes, minutes when anything could be happening. Jessie imagines Bella crushed beneath a lightning-felled tree, her trainers poking out, the neon-yellow soles.

Out of the kitchen window, the cone of Will’s flashlight nudges through the shrubs and shadows. Jessie desperately wishes she could run back into the afternoon, refuse to let Bella take Romy anywhere, listen to her gut.

Will throws open the back door. His hair is flat on his head. His eyes bloodshot. Like a man emerging from a rough sea. “She’s most likely to be at a school friend’s house, don’t you reckon?” he says breathlessly.

“I don’t know,” she replies.

He swipes his car keys from a pottery bowl on the kitchen worktop. “There’s not a particular house she hangs out at after school?”

Jessie swallows. Her throat is sore from shouting earlier. “I . . . I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”

Will stares at her searchingly, longer than is comfortable. “But I thought you said that . . .” He looks confused, then something seems to dawn on him. Or maybe he reads the guilt in her face, the way she’s staring down at her hands, cursing her eagerness to tell Will only what she thought he wanted to hear about Bella’s friendships.

“She normally comes home after school, if there’s no school club,” she says quietly.

“Right.” Will is frowning.

She can tell he feels duped, lulled into believing things about their weekday life that are not exactly untrue, just tangentially true, a version of a life that hasn’t quite happened yet. “I’m sorry if I misled you. I . . . I didn’t want you to worry about Bella while you’re in London, that’s all.”

A moment passes. “Right,” he says again, only more tersely, and she feels it like a physical thing, the way distrust slips between them. She stands up quickly, the chair rocking back. “There’s a class list somewhere.”

“I’m going to check the pub. Call me if you hear anything.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” Desolate, Jessie stares out of the window as Will’s car roars away. So it wasn’t Romy, she thinks, covering her nose and mouth with her hands. It wasn’t Romy who was going to vanish—Romy is happily asleep upstairs, bottom balled in the air like a baby. It was Bella herself, of course, Bella reenacting the past. She must tell Will this. That it’s about the girl, the vanishing girl, the story planted like a pip in Bella’s head, a true story, not a Squirrels myth. Full disclosure now. She is picking up her cell to call him when the doorbell rings. The police, she thinks. Oh God.

But it is the most wonderful sight: sodden, mud-sprayed, black-eyed, like a girl who lives in the woods. Jessie reaches out to hug her. Bella steps back, leaving Jessie swiping at air.

Out of the shadows, emerging from a dripping umbrella, a tall woman in a mackintosh. “I’m afraid I kidnapped her.”

The voice. So soft. So well-spoken. So familiar. Jessie is unable to believe her eyes. “It’s you!”

The woman smiles uncertainly, trying to place her. “I . . .”

“Sorry, I come to your café,” Jessie explains, trying to collect herself. “With my little girl? I come and eat cake with my little girl.”

“Of course. Sorry.” The look of recognition is swiftly followed by astonishment. “And it was you . . . you bought Applecote Manor? My goodness. I had no idea.”

Jessie looks from Bella to the woman in confusion. “But, Bella, how . . . ?”

Bella moves awkwardly from one foot to the other, her trainers making a squelching sound. “I was actually completely fine,” she mumbles.

“It’s just that she didn’t look particularly fine, that’s all. I was driving back from a friend’s, and there she was, this determined young thing, marching along the lane in the storm. She refused to get into a car with a stranger, sensible girl. But I begged her to make an exception this once. That lane is no place for a young girl at night . . . I insisted she get in. Absolutely my fault, not hers.” She smiles, firm but kind. “You mustn’t be cross with her.”

Cross? Jessie can only imagine what Bella’s said. “I’m just pleased to have her home. Thank you, thank you so much. I’m immensely grateful.”

The café woman touches Bella lightly on the arm, says softly, in an easy maternal way, like Jessie isn’t there, “You sure you’re quite okay now?”

Bella nods, mutters thanks, and pushes past Jessie into the house. A well-timed flick of her wet hair stings Jessie’s cheek as Jessie texts Will to tell him the wanderer has returned.

“Pop along to the café sometime,” the lady calls after her. But Bella’s gone. Somewhere a door slams.

Jessie sticks out a hand. “Jessie.”

The woman hesitates, unsure about revealing her name. “Margot. Margot Waters.”

Margot. The woman looks like a Margot. “Would you like to come in? Warm up with a cup of tea?”

Jessie sees her hesitation, the familiar twitch: Margot knows about Applecote, Jessie realizes. Her spirits sink.

“I better get back. But thank you for the kind offer.” Margot peers curiously over Jessie’s shoulder into the hall. “You’ve made it very beautiful,” she says in a tone of quiet appreciation.

“Oh, it’s just a lick of paint, really,” says Jessie, wondering what Margot’s comparing it to, how well she knows the house. “It was always beautiful.”

“It was,” Margot says, lighting up.

Jessie has the odd sensation of being in the way, standing between the house and Margot, as you might two ex-lovers in a crowded room.

“Are you sure you won’t come in?” she asks again.

“No. No, I won’t,” she says more firmly. “I must go.” With one hand, Margot pulls up a leopard-print scarf from her hood, settling it over her mink-gray hair.

Jessie starts. Seeing the scarf, she thinks of the woman she spotted that day in August as she hung from the orchard wall, that woman with the two black Labradors, walking away from the house. No, too much of a coincidence. There must be dozens of women in the Cotswolds with leopard-print scarves.

“I hope you’re happy here, Jessie. Bella, too. She’s a very spirited girl.” Margot lowers her voice into something more conspiratorial. “A good thing in the end, I promise.”

Jessie’s throat locks. She fights the urge to throw herself at the older woman and tell her everything about the agonies of trying to mother Bella, stepping into a dead wife’s shoes, but she has a funny hunch that somehow Margot has guessed it all anyway.

“Well, good night,” Margot says, more briskly now, withdrawing.

“Thank you again.”

Margot steps out of the shelter of the portico and stops, turns around once more. “The drain at the back, it’s blocked. It always blocks this time of year.”

“Sorry?” says Jessie, bemused.

“If you don’t clear it, you’ll get damp in the top floor bathroom.”

“Oh. Okay. Thank you,” Jessie says with a small puzzled laugh that soon stops. “But how do you know . . .” Her voice trails off.

Margot is already walking down the path to her car in the rain. Jessie stares after her, puzzled. As she drives away, Jessie sees them, just for a brief second, in the puddle of light thrown by the lamp at the end of the drive: the two noses pressed against the car’s rear window, a gleam of black fur, the two dogs’ eyes glowing like lamps, then gone.