Bridget stood in the kitchen with her manuscripts piled on the table in front of her. Released on bail, that’s what the letter had told her. The police had said that as she had pleaded guilty to assault that the CPS had decided to drop all other charges and she could expect a short hearing before a sentencing judge at the Magistrates’ Court. It might not even result in a custodial sentence, seeing how she was of previous good character.
Character? She’d destroyed that, hadn’t she? This would not do. She was a disgrace to Gallant House and to the Jacks. She was of no use to anyone, having only ever done damage when she’d meant to help. Her tenants all saw her now as the evil spider drawing them into her web, when she’d meant it as a reciprocal exchange.
Who are you fooling, Bridget? It might’ve started like that, but you went far off course. As soon as you stole from a lodger, you were in the wrong and you should’ve known it.
She still couldn’t see what was wrong with the sex with Jonah. She’d thought they’d both liked it. He’d always said it didn’t matter to him what they did, but apparently, according to her psychiatrist, who she was seeing on the advice of her lawyer, that had been an exploitative relationship too, a misuse of power.
And I’ve always thought of myself as the most powerless person in London.
Still, no more of that, thought Bridget. She wasn’t going to leave the house again – not even to attend court. And she had important business to transact. There was only one way to make this good – one more sacrifice that she could make to apologise to the house for what she had done. Gallant House was the only thing that cared about her now and she’d not stopped it from being harmed. Still, for all the abuse, it whispered its comfort to her, sang her lullabies and promised all would be well. The lost children were here with her to keep her company too. Especially that boy from the well who tracked in drips of water wherever he went.
Or were they tears?
She wondered if her lodgers would come. She’d invited them for five o’clock this Tuesday in late autumn but had no real expectation that they’d seize the olive branch. They didn’t need her; they were doing well enough on their own from what she heard. But she needed them for afterwards as there was no one else. The house mattered even if she didn’t. If they didn’t come, her plan would still work. She’d arranged things with her solicitor and left instructions. She’d get her last word as she had always wanted, not quite swinging from the chandelier, but close.
But what to do with these? Her life’s work. Useless now. Only the house wanted them.
Bridget’s gaze when to the kitchen courtyard, ankle deep in leaves that no one had swept up. She’d rather let the house go since getting out of hospital. It all felt too much. She was sorry for that too.
The well. Yes, that would do perfectly adequately for settling everything. She should have time before Jenny and Jonah arrived.
Taking the papers out in bundles, she lined up the manuscripts on the low wall and heaved up the well cover.
Jonah hadn’t been in favour of Jenny coming back to Gallant House. She still had more dark days than light where he found her staring at nothing but, when asked what she was doing, she would only say that she was looking into the void. He knew what that meant. She was too nice. She was burdened with an unreasonable sense of responsibility for what she’d done, not taking his own ‘good riddance’ approach. Going back to the scene would surely only make matters worse?
‘I can go see the old cow on my own,’ he argued. ‘No need for you to put yourself through that. You could go and see Louis and Kris.’ The couple had restored their friendship with Jenny after the full details of Bridget’s subterfuge emerged. Kris had apologised for being such a judgmental bastard and Jenny had apologised for being such a desperate bitch; Louis had predictably wept happy tears while Jonah made tactless remarks from the sidelines about sentimental fools that had them all ganging up against him. Happy days.
‘She asked to see us both,’ Jenny said in her soft husky voice he so loved.
‘I don’t need you to come – I’d prefer if you didn’t.’
‘Can’t I be worried for you too? It was hardly a good place for you either.’
He whistled for a taxi outside their Vauxhall riverside apartment. ‘Nothing like it is for you. I’ve no complaints. By almost killing me, I got you and I got more publicity than Carol knows what to do with.’ He knew just how to get her out of her dark place. ‘By the way, she’d sent some dates for your magazine photoshoot. Go on: wear just a tea towel and drape yourself over rocks: I dare you.’
‘I’m classy. I don’t do that kind of thing,’ said Jenny, back to her adorable prim self after her walk on the wild side. It was getting harder to tempt her over but he was giving it his best shot.
‘It’ll sell more downloads.’
‘How about a compromise. I wear a tea towel and drape myself over you – in private?’
He shouted with laughter just as the taxi pulled up. Their smiles had even the taciturn driver grinning.
‘Where to, mate?’
‘Gallant House, Blackheath.’ Jonah listed off the postcode which was now engraved in his memory for all time.
‘Righto.’
Half an hour later, Jonah paid the taxi and they got out in front of the house. The roof had been fixed but from the looks of it, the decorating hadn’t yet been done. They rang the bell. Nothing.
‘I suppose we are a bit early,’ said Jonah.
‘There’s a note.’ Jenny bent down to pick up a fold of thick letter paper. ‘Come in – the door isn’t locked.’
‘God, the mad old bird isn’t thinking we’ll sit through one of her Tuesday gatherings, is she? If she offers you Pimms, refuse.’
Jenny nodded and tried the door. It opened.
The house smelt different: smoke and dust. It reminded Jonah of a battlefield set he’d filmed on recently for his new role in a Second World War drama.
‘Bridget, we’re here!’ he called.
No Bridget emerged. She wasn’t in the kitchen, or the parlour.
‘Let’s go into the snug and see if we can spot her in the garden.’ The snug had always felt more their room than hers.
Opening the door, Jonah had a surge of nostalgia at seeing the warty sofas had survived the fire damage.
‘Some things just can’t be destroyed,’ he said, running his hand along the back. ‘If the balloon goes up and we’ve the ten-minute warning for Armageddon, we get under these and we’ll be fine.’
‘Like Indiana Jones in the lead-lined fridge?’ asked Jenny.
‘Yeah, like that. Crap film, wasn’t it? Should’ve stopped at three.’
Jenny went to the window. ‘I can’t see her.’
Jonah opened the balcony door. The railing he’d knocked down was still hanging on by a single screw. The vine had lost its leaves which lay in a slippery mat on the balcony. He stepped out. The ironwork gave a bigger groan than ever.
‘Don’t!’ Jenny grabbed him, but he had spotted Bridget.
‘Hey, Bridget, we’re here!’ Their former landlady was standing by the open well dropping batches of paper into it. She didn’t seem to hear them, locked in her own world.
Jenny came out onto the balcony, holding on the vine for dear life. ‘What’s she doing?’
‘I think it’s her book.’
‘But why? I like her book.’
‘Hey, Bridget, don’t do that! Jenny likes your book!’
But Bridget was oblivious, completely unaware of her surroundings. She took the last pile of papers and threw them down the shaft.
And with no warning, she stepped over the low wall and followed the manuscript.
Jenny screamed. Bridget had been there – and now she wasn’t.
‘Shit! Fuck!’ said Jonah. He scrambled over the edge of the balcony and dropped down, holding onto the vine to reach the ground. Jenny had to jump back into the snug as the old ironwork finally parted from the house and clanged to the courtyard pavement, becoming a steep gangplank. From his swearing, he’d been hit by some of it. Jenny raced down the stairs, through the kitchen and out into the yard. Jonah was leaning over the well shaft.
‘Get a rope!’
‘Where am I going to get rope?’ But Jenny was already ringing the emergency services while going through the gardener’s shed. They had to be wondering just what was wrong with Gallant House.
Pretty much everything.
She did find a hank of rope in the gardener’s shed and rushed back to Jonah. He made a loop around his chest and tied the other end to the vine. He gave it a couple of strong tugs to test it.
‘This is stupid. We should wait for help,’ said Jenny.
‘We are the help,’ said Jonah.
‘But you don’t know how to do this! You’ll kill yourself!’
He looked into the well. ‘You’re right. I’ve got an idea. Change of plan.’ He took the rope off himself and looped it around her the same way. ‘I’m lowering you down.’
‘Me?’
‘Well, you can’t do the same for me, can you? And I can’t suddenly become some Special Forces hero who knows how to fucking do these things.’
‘Jonah, no!’
‘No arguments – we’ve got seconds to save her if she’s still alive. I won’t let anything happen to you, I promise. But this way, you can lift her head clear of the water and I can support you both until the professionals arrive.’
Jenny decided this was one of the stupider things she’d ever done with Jonah – and there had been quite a few of them. But not having a better idea, she let him lower her slowly into the well shaft. As she went, twirling in the dark, she couldn’t help thinking of the layers of history Bridget had written about: lost boys, foolish maids, hopeless rebels, Vikings, cavemen, dinosaurs. Madness – all of it.
The rope cut into her chest reminding her why she was here.
‘Bridget?’
No sound. But Bridget had gone in feet first so there was a chance she had landed in the water and come up to the surface. Jenny had no idea how deep the well was. Finally, her feet touched water.
‘I’m at the bottom!’ she called.
‘Can you find her?’
It was a narrow shaft. If she was here at all she would be right next to Jenny. ‘Drop me about half a metre.’
The water rose to her thighs. Jenny used one hand to grope around under the surface. This was awful. Her fingers tangled with some long strands of hair. She hauled it up and Bridget’s head broke the surface. In the dim light her face was almost luminous, eyes closed. She looked oddly serene, like that Millais picture of Ophelia, floating downstream on her back. Scraps of manuscript, nothing but pond weed now, draped over Bridget’s mouth and curled around her neck.
‘Got her!’
‘Keep hold – help’s arrived. They’re just fetching the rescue gear.’
And so Jenny’s last moments with Bridget took place at the bottom of the well. Jenny knew she was holding a dead woman but oddly it wasn’t frightening. If she had to give it a word, she would’ve said it felt weirdly sacred, a kind of atonement on her part for all that she’d done wrong. Her anger at her landlady dripped away into the icy black water. What was the point of holding this fury close to her chest like some Cleopatra-style asp to bite at her breast? Bridget was gone, and so Jenny’s resentment needed to follow. Matt had gone too. Only she was left, their survivor, and she had her own sins to answer for.
And what did her sins amount too? Chiefly, a moment of madness after a shocking attack – the malign atmosphere of the house finally getting to her. Jonah was always telling her that no jury would convict and there was no justice in putting herself through a trial merely so she could tell the police the truth. Sometimes silence was the best option.
It was the house that did it. Here in the void that dived beneath Gallant House, Jenny finally convinced herself she was not entirely to blame. ‘Matt, I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry for what you became – and for what I did to you.’
The black heath water of the well soaked her sins away, a dark baptism. She’d leave her deeds down here and find the strength to move on with her life.
The quiet moment was broken when a fireman rappelled down to take over.
‘Here you go, love,’ he said gently.
A more comfortable harness was slid over Jenny’s head and she was pulled to the surface.
Jonah was waiting anxiously in the courtyard. As soon as he saw her emerge from the shaft, he came forward and wrapped her in a towel. His hands were bleeding from the strain of holding the rope but he didn’t seem to notice.
‘How is she?’
Jenny just looked at him.
‘What?’ His sweet ugly face was genuinely puzzled.
‘You lowered me down a well.’ She’d tell him later about the moment of revelation – that didn’t suit a time when they were surrounded by men in neon clothing.
‘Yeah.’ He shrugged as if to say, ‘so?’.
‘If ever you say I’m not completely loyal to you, remember today.’
That was their code. Neither spoke of love – that had been too polluted for them – but both spoke freely – and longingly – of loyalty.
‘Oh, my beautiful Jenny, I’m loyal to you too.’ He hugged her.
An hour later, sitting at the kitchen table, Jenny and Jonah looked across at Inspector Khan and Sergeant Foley.
‘Hello again,’ said Khan. ‘I had sincerely hoped I’d seen the last of you two. So, who’s going to tell me what went on here?’
‘That would be me,’ replied Jonah, reading Jenny’s expression correctly. ‘This probably doesn’t look good.’
‘Let us be the judge of that.’
Jonah sighed. ‘OK, right.’ He gathered his thoughts. ‘Look, Bridget invited us over and we were in the snug upstairs looking for her when we saw her jump in the well. I was standing on the balcony trying to get her attention and she just stepped in. I don’t think she even registered that we were there. Fucking weirdest thing I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen a lot of strange shit. I didn’t know it was coming.’
‘Why were you here? I’d’ve thought you would steer well clear of this place.’
‘We’d been asked to come by Bridget. She said she wanted to set things right with us. I suppose we were looking for closure.’
Jenny winced. Jonah had a habit of serving up these lines from dramas he’d been in. They stuck out of his conversation like a harmonious passage in his otherwise raucous chorus of crudities.
‘We really had no idea she meant to do this,’ Jenny added.
Foley spread out a note on the table. ‘We searched the house. She left this note on her bed.’
Jenny looked at it in horror. What on earth did it say? Had Bridget set them up?
Catching Jenny’s expression, Foley gave a wry smile. ‘Fortunately for you both, it explains what she had decided to do – end her life – tidy herself away, as she put it. She wanted you to find her note and call us to recover her body. She trusted you both.’
‘You’re lucky there, or we’d be looking at you for this,’ said Khan.
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’ asked Jonah, sounding pissed off. ‘We tried to save her!’
‘Well, you had plenty of reason to dislike her.’ Foley pushed across a name and address. ‘She wanted you to have this too.’
‘What is it?’ asked Jenny, speaking before Jonah could start swearing at the police again. She didn’t get the sense they were out to get them this time, though doubtless that was what Jonah’s past had led him to expect.
‘Name and address of her solicitor. She appointed you her executors. You’re to settle her estate and give the proceeds to charity.’
Jenny was speechless. This was the last thing she expected from Bridget. Reading the note though, she realised that Bridget was under the mistaken impression that they would care for the house as much as she did and see it properly handled.
‘Her last laugh? We get burdened with the responsibility of Gallant House until we can sell it off?’ marvelled Jonah. ‘Fuck, I have to admit she was a vengeful old bat.’
‘And Admiral’s Walk next door, as her neighbour, Norman, left it to her,’ added Foley.
‘She thought we were up to the job of selling two houses on millionaires’ row? You’re shitting me?’
‘I’m not, Mr Brigson – Jonah. It’ll take a while for all this to clear through probate. I imagine it will be quite time consuming.’ Foley actually looked amused, as far as her professional demeanour would allow. ‘We’ll get a driver to take you home.’
‘In a black and white? No thanks.’
‘We can arrange an unmarked police car,’ said Khan.
‘Still no.’
The detectives left to speak to the firemen who were just wrapping up their retrieval operation. When Jonah followed them a few minutes later, he wheedled out of the firemen the headlines of their findings. He reported back to Jenny that they’d found mushed up paper, many plastic pill bottles, but no more bodies. He had wondered at one particularly insane point about Gillian, the tenant who Bridget said she had been given the boot. Bridget had a fondness for hiding things down the well but she hadn’t been a homicidal maniac after all.
That was just Jenny and him, he said before she slapped her hand over his mouth. The police were still in the house and not something she could talk about, especially not as a joke. Her recovery was too fragile for that.
‘I’m still reeling,’ Jonah admitted, sipping at the tea she’d made him while he’d pumped the firemen for information. ‘Did you have any idea she’d do that?’
Throw herself down the well like some ancient druid sacrifice? It made a weird kind of sense seeing how Bridget had been obsessed with the house and the deaths it had witnessed. Killing herself was her final chapter. ‘No, but it fits, doesn’t it?’
‘Are we going to do it?’ He asked. ‘Sell the houses for her?’
‘Do we have to?’ Jenny looked round the kitchen she had once loved. She had to admit that the house was seductive. It had trapped Bridget; begun its magic on Jenny even down that well; if she stayed, she feared the little healing she’d found here would turn poisonous.
‘We don’t owe Bridget anything – fucking opposite of that. I wouldn’t mind so much if we get to choose the charity – the Jonah and Jenny Fund.’
Jenny knew he was only half-joking. ‘I don’t think we’ll be allowed to do that. Maybe we can choose where the money goes though? Get something good out of the place.’
‘Yeah, finance the dogs’ home for a century. Did you have to fucking burn this house down, Jen?’ he said. ‘You lowered its value on the market.’
‘That was obviously my first consideration.’
‘How about you sell this one, I take the one without the fire damage?’
Her answer was two fingers and he chuckled. ‘Seriously, what do you want to do with it?’ He swept his hand to the cobwebbed ceiling. ‘What do you say to a quick sale to some nice normal cutthroat developers? Dump the money on some charity for abuse victims. That way we can wash our hands of Bridget’s final revenge and move on.’
‘We don’t want to get caught up with it – that’s what happened to her.’
‘Then let’s get rid of it as quickly as possible. Break the curse. Move on and move in to our own place, somewhere central? The apartment Carol’s lent us in Vauxhall is OK, but it’s not really us, is it? Not ours. I should be able to afford a mortgage on our own flat with the work coming my way.’
She put her mug down carefully. ‘Together? You and me, sharing a place, permanently?’
‘What do you think I mean?’
She signed her reply with one of the first insults she’d taught him.
He laughed. ‘Yeah I am. Just as well that you’re in loyalty with me as absolutely no one else would be mad enough to have me as a flatmate. I smoke like a fucking chimney and swear like a … like me. I’m amazed you’ve lasted this long.’ He got out his phone. ‘I’m not accepting any lifts from the fuzz. Want to ring for a taxi?’
Jenny pushed his hand down gently. ‘I need to get the smell of this place out of my head. Let’s walk through Greenwich Park along the meridian.’
‘A final farewell to Bridget and the black-hearted Jacks?’ He tucked his phone away. ‘Yeah, let’s do that. We’ll lay their ghosts to rest. This isn’t our burden to carry.’
With his arm around her shoulders, Jonah and Jenny walked out of Gallant House, following the imaginary line into brighter skies.