He looks up at her smartly. He seems confused. ‘Lexie Mulligan? God. No. I mean, we’re friends and everything. But no. Not in that way. You know, I’m pretty sure she’s not even straight.She had a big crush on Scarlett for a while. But anyway. No. Not Lexie. Not anyone. Just me.’
‘You know the other night? When the police were here after they found the second “Dig Here” sign?’
He nods.
‘Had Lexie been up here that night?’
‘Here? You mean, in my room?’
‘Yes. In your room.’
‘No. Definitely not. I actually don’t think Lexie’s ever been in my room.’
‘Can I go out on your balcony?’
‘Sure,’ he says. ‘It’s not locked.’
She slides the door open and goes to the edge of the balcony. She peers over and out towards the flower bed and she steps on to her tiptoes and leans out even further and she realises that even at this angle and at this height, she cannot see the spot where the ‘Dig Here’ sign had been posted. She turns round and looks overhead, but there are no balconies above. Lexie had definitely been lying about seeing the ‘Dig Here’ sign from her apartment. Or from anywhere, for that matter. She knew about it, not because she’d seen it but because either she or her mother had put it there.
Sophie walks back towards the sofa, but as she does so, her eye is caught by another painting on Liam’s wall; it’s a smaller canvas than Scarlett’s self-portrait, but painted using the same strokes and the same jolting, in-your-face colour palette. It’s a stone spiral staircase, with the steps painted in garish rainbow shades all blending and bleeding into one another almost like melted wax. A pole of bright golden light beams down from acircular window at the top of the tower that the steps are housed in and pierces the stone floor at the bottom, creating a plume of purply-grey smoke and sparks of glitter. Just to the side of the hole is another knife, again smeared with what looks like blood.
‘What the hell is this one?’
Liam shrugs. ‘It’s another one of Scarlett’s. She painted it during her breakdown. She said she needed me to take care of it for her. For posterity.’
‘But what’s it of?’
‘I don’t really know. I mean, I know what it looks like – there’s a staircase in her house, in the really old part of the building. It goes up to a kind of turret with a tiny room at the top with little slit eyes for arrows. They never used the little room. It was too small to put any furniture in.’
Sophie stares at the painting, hard, trying to divine some more meaning from it. ‘Did she ever say anything about the room?’
She stands closer and peers at the detail. There’s a kind of rectangle of light around the bottom step. It bleeds through a small gap. The blood from the knife trickles towards this gap and then disappears. As she stares at the knife, she notices that it’s not actually a knife at all, that it has a bent end with a U-shape cut into it. It’s not a knife, it’s a lever. She feels her heart stop beating for a split second, and then start again, twice as fast.
‘Would you mind’, she says, ‘if I take a picture of this?’
‘Sure,’ he says casually. ‘Do you think it’s a clue of some kind?’
She nods. ‘Yes,’ she says, her cool tone belying the electric instincts setting all her nerves on edge. ‘I think it might be.’
51
June 2017
The bright sun strobes through the willow hanks as Zach and Tallulah cross the common towards the pub. Zach takes her hand as they walk and keeps up a running commentary. He tells her about a guy at work who just got a rescue dog that can’t bark and another guy at work whose kid was arrested last week for vandalism and he tells her about the possibility of a caravan in the New Forest that he might be able to borrow for a week off a friend of one of his sisters – they could go there for their summer holidays, maybe, and Tallulah nods and smiles and makes all the right noises because she has nothing to lose now by being nice to him. By the end of this evening they will never hold hands again, he will never chat to her like this again; by the end of tonight there will be a solid wall between them that will be, she knows, becauseit is how Zach works, absolutely unbreachable. So for now, while the sun shines and there is wine to be drunk and no more exams and a night out, why not be nice, why not pretend that everything is fine?
The garden at the front of the pub is packed. The Swan & Ducks is a destination pub, not just a local. People come from all the surrounding villages and hamlets, especially on a sunny Friday night in June.
It’s quieter inside the pub. The barman points out their table to them and Tallulah catches her breath. There’s a bottle of champagne chilling on the table in a chrome bucket, and two champagne flutes.
‘Ta-da,’ says Zach, leading her to the table.
She goes to pull out her chair but Zach intervenes and says, ‘No, allow me,’ before pulling the chair out for her and then tucking her in on it.
Tallulah smiles and says, ‘Wow, thank you. This is amazing.’
‘The least you deserve,’ Zach replies, pulling out his own chair and seating himself.
Tallulah glances up at him. His face is soft, wreathed in smiles. He looks like the sweet lost boy who started secondary school halfway through and she feels her resolve start to diminish.