‘Yeah. Her daughter. She’s, like, in her twenties. But she left early. She was driving. And she took my friend Liam with her.’
‘So, after that, it was just you, Tallulah, Zach and … Mimi?’
‘Yup.’
‘And your mum and dad?’
‘Mum was here. She was asleep. Dad’s away on business.’
Kim turns to Joss, who is sitting on the steps behind her, listening in to the conversation. ‘You don’t happen to have security cameras, do you? Anywhere in the grounds?’
Joss nods and says, ‘Yes, tons of them. But I’m afraid I haven’t got the vaguest idea how to use them.’ She glances across at her son. ‘Rex? Any idea how to look at the camera footage?’
Rex grimaces. ‘Not really. I know there’s like some kind of centralised panel in dad’s study, but I’ve never actually used it.’
Kim says, ‘Do you think we might try?’ And as she says it she feels the mood change immediately. Until now she’s been a minordistraction, entertained on their own terms. Now she’s asking people to go indoors, to open doors, work out how to use equipment. She sees the three of them exchange looks. Then Joss gets to her feet and approaches Kim and says, ‘Tell you what. Save us all traipsing about in Martin’s office, why don’t I just get Rex to have a look in a bit. I’ll get him to give Martin a ring to talk him through it. Scarlett’s got your number. We’ll call you if we find anything.’
Kim still has so many things she wants to ask, so many questions she needs answers to. She’s not ready to go. ‘You said Tallulah hadn’t been here before?’ she asks, a hint of desperation in her voice. ‘And on the phone earlier you said you didn’t really know her. I mean, you didn’t even know she had a child. So what … I mean, why was she even here?’
Scarlett pulls her towel over her shoulders like a cloak and rubs at her ears with its corners. ‘We chat sometimes,’ she says, ‘at college. Then I saw her in the pub last night and we had a few drinks and one thing led to another.’
Kim’s eyes take her in again, this lanky, angular girl with whom her daughter chatted sometimes. She takes in the detail of her; the piercings that catch the light, the tattoo on her shoulder blade, the perfectly painted toenails. And her gaze alights on a black mark on Scarlett’s foot, a small tattoo, a pair of letters that she can’t at first quite make out. Then she sees that it is the trademark symbol. Scarlett’s hand reaches down and covers the tattoo, hard and fast, like swatting a fly. Their eyes meet briefly and Kim sees something defensive and raw pass across Scarlett’s face.
She hitches her bag onto her shoulder. ‘Would it be possible’, she says, ‘to speak to your friend Mimi, do you think? Do you have a number for her?’
‘She won’t know anything more than I do.’
‘Please?’
‘I’ll get her to call you,’ says Scarlett.
Within a minute they are pushing Noah’s buggy back through the wrought-iron gate and on to the front courtyard and Joss is standing under a bower of passionflowers with her gigantic dog, waving them off, and as they walk towards the driveway, Kim hears the splash of bodies hitting the cool, blue surface of the swimming pool, a small squeal of laughter.
7
August 2018
Sophie comes from an outdoorsy family. They go on walking holidays and sailing holidays and skiing holidays. Her father runs marathons, her mother plays golf and tennis, both her brothers work in the sports industry. Sophie was once a swimmer. She has medals and cups and certificates in a big box in her parents’ loft and still has a swimmer’s physique although she barely swims at all these days. When they were all small and getting on her mother’s nerves, she would zip them into their coats and lock them in the back garden. They would moan for a while and then find something to do. Usually involving climbing very tall trees and swinging off things that weren’t designed to be swung off. So Sophie is very comfortable being outdoors and confident in her ability to find her way about and deal with obstacles alone withoutassistance. And so she sets off into the woods, sensibly dressed and equipped with water, energy bars, a mobile charger for her phone, her compass, some plasters, sun cream, a hat and a packet of bright red plastic space-marker cones that she can drop on the forest floor at intervals if she needs to find her way back.
Inside the woods, the tree cover is immense and very little of the pale gold August sun gets through. Within a few feet she feels the temperature begin to drop. She holds her compass in her right hand and follows the path alongside the arrow telling her where to go.
After twenty minutes the denseness of the middle of the woods starts to thin out again and there are established footpaths meandering through the trees, signs of humanity, pieces of litter, a dog poo in a green plastic bag hanging from a branch. She checks her map again now that she has briefly regained her phone signal and finds that she is about to emerge on to a bridleway. She moves the map across her screen with her fingers and sees the linear representation of a large building to her right.
After a moment she sees a turret and a weathervane. Then she sees the curve of an ancient brick wall and a curtain of bright red Virginia creeper. She squeezes through a parade of trees that abuts the wall and finds herself in front of a rusty metal gate, a broken padlock hanging from its bars, and then she is through the gate and into a clump of woodland; the shimmer of blue sky is visible ahead of her and then she is on a ragged sun-bleached lawn that rolls downwards via wide stone steps overgrown with thistles towards a house that looks like something from a Tim Burton movie.
Sophie catches her breath and puts a hand to her throat.
As she runs down the tiered lawns towards the house she sees the pool appear; it’s dark green, a ripped cover half pulled across it, mulchy dead leaves from the previous winter stacked around it. A pagoda at one end of the pool has been covered in boldly coloured graffiti.
The terrace between the pool and the house is littered with empty beer cans and cigarette ends, drug paraphernalia and discarded crisp packets and takeaway containers.
How, Sophie wonders, could a house of this magnificence, not to mention market value, have been left like this? Why is it not being cared for, even while it is uninhabited?
She picks her away around the house, trying to peer into windows through gaps in the shutters. At the front of the house is an ornate courtyard and beyond that a long cypress-lined driveway that appears to go on for a mile or more. She turns to look at the front door. Above the fanlight, carved into the dark brickwork, is the dateAD1721.
The air is thick and silent here, and nothing else in sight. This house exists almost on an island. Sophie wonders about the family who lived here, the hedge-fund manager and his glamorous wife and their talented teenage daughter. Where are they now, and what on earth possessed them to leave a place like this to go to seed?
She checks the time on her phone. It’s nearly midday.