فصل شانزدهم

I woke to the sound of screams and a confusion so loud that my first instinct was to clap my hands over my ears, even as I bolted upright in my bed, staring wildly around, shivering with cold.

The lights were on—all of them, turned up to their brightest, most eye-searing maximum. And the room was icy-cold. But the noise—Jesus, the noise.

It was music, or at least I supposed so. But so loud and distorted that the tune was unrecognizable, the howling and squealing coming from the speakers in the ceiling turning it into a formless din.

For a minute I couldn’t think what the hell to do. Then I ran to the panel on the wall and began pushing buttons, my pulse pounding in my ears, the screeching misshapen music like a howl in my head. Nothing happened except that the lights in the closets turned on to join the rest.

“Music off!” I shouted. “Speakers off! Volume down!”

Nothing, nothing.

From downstairs I could hear furious barking, and terrified steam-train shrieks coming from Petra’s room, and at last, abandoning my attempts with the panel, I grabbed my dressing gown and fled.

The music was just as loud outside the children’s rooms—louder even, for the narrow walls of the hallway seemed to funnel it. And the lights were on down here too, showing me a glimpse of Petra through the nursery doorway, standing up in her cot, her hair tousled on end, screaming in fear.

I snatched her up and ran to the girls’ room at the end of the corridor, shoving the door open to find Maddie curled in a fetal position in her bed, her hands over her ears, and Ellie nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s Ellie?” I bellowed, above the noise of the music, and Petra’s fire-engine wails. Maddie looked up, her face blank with fear, her hands still clapped over her ears, and I grabbed her wrist and hauled her to her feet.

“Where’s Ellie?” I yelled, directly into her face, and she pulled away and fled down the stairs, with me following.

In the entrance hall the noise was just as bad, and there, in the middle of the Persian rug at the foot of the stairs, was Ellie. She was crouched into a little ball, her arms wrapped around her head. All about her leapt the terrified dogs, released from their beds in the utility room, adding their frantic barks to the cacophony.

“Ellie!” I shouted. “What happened? Did you press something?”

She looked up at me, blank and uncomprehending, and I shook my head and then ran over to the tablet sitting on the metal breakfast bar. I opened up the home-management app, but when I tapped in my access code, nothing happened. Had I misremembered it? I tapped it in again, the dogs’ furious woofs like a jackhammer of sound against my skull. Still nothing. You are locked— I had time to read, before the screen lit up momentarily and then died—a red battery warning flashing for an instant before it went black. Fuck.

I slammed my hand onto the wall panel and the lights above the cooker turned on and a screen on the fridge began blasting out YouTube, but the music volume didn’t reduce. I could feel my heart thumping wildly in my chest, growing more and more panicked as I realized I had no way of turning this thing off. What a stupid fucking idea—a smart house? This was the least smart thing I could imagine.

The children were shivering now, Petra still letting out earsplitting shrieks of distress next to my ear as the dogs ran in circles around us, and I tried the power button on the tablet, more helplessly, not expecting the thing to work, and it didn’t. The screen was completely dark. My phone was upstairs—but could I leave the terrified children long enough to fetch it?

I was staring round, wondering what on earth I was going to do, when I felt a touch on my shoulder. I jumped so wildly I almost dropped Petra, and swung round accusingly to find Jack Grant, standing so close behind me that my shoulder touched his bare chest as I turned. We both took an involuntary step back, me nearly tripping over a stool.

He was naked from the waist up and had plainly been asleep, judging by his rumpled hair, and he bellowed something, pointing at the door, but I shook my head, and he came close, cupping his hands around my ear.

“What’s happening? I could hear the din from the stables.”

“I have no idea!” I yelled back. “I was asleep—maybe one of the girls touched something—I can’t get it to turn off.” “Can I try?” he shouted, and I felt like laughing in his face. Could he? I would kiss him if he succeeded. I shoved the tablet at him, almost aggressively.

“Be my guest!”

He tried to turn the tablet on and then realized, as I had, that it was out of power. Then he went to the utility room and opened up a cupboard there, the one where the Wi-Fi router was kept, along with the electricity meter. I’m not completely sure what he did in there, I was too busy comforting an increasingly distraught Petra, but all of a sudden everything went pitch-black, and the sound stopped with an abruptness that was disorienting. I found my ears were ringing with the aftermath.

In the silence, I could hear Ellie’s panicked gasping sobs and Maddie rocking back and forth.

Petra, in my arms, stopped crying, and I felt her little body go stiff with surprise. Then she let out a gurgling laugh.

“Night night!” she said.

Then there was a click, and the lights came back on—less brightly this time, and fewer of them.

“There,” Jack said. He came back through, wiping his forehead, the dogs padding in his wake, suddenly calm again. “It’s gone back to default settings now. Bloody hell. Okay.” There was sweat on his forehead in spite of the chill in the air, and when he sat down at the kitchen counter, the tablet in his hands, I could see his hands were shaking.

Mine, as I set Petra beside Maddie, were trembling too.

Jack plugged the tablet in and now he put it down to wait until it had enough charge to turn on.

“Th-thank you,” I said shakily. Ellie was still sobbing in the hallway. “Ellie, there’s no need to cry, sweetie. It’s okay now. Look . . . um . . .” I crossed the kitchen and began rummaging in the cupboards. “Look . . . here we are, have a jammie dodger. You too, Maddie.” “We’ve brushed our teeth,” Maddie said blankly, and I suppressed a hysterical laugh. Fuck teeth, was what I wanted to say, but I managed to bite it back.

“I think just this once, it’ll be okay. We’ve all had a shock. Sugar is good for shock.” “Aye, it’s true,” Jack said, rather solemnly. “Back in the old day they’d make you drink sweet tea, but since I don’t really like sugar in my tea, I’ll have a jammie dodger too, thanks, Rowan.” “See?” I handed one to Jack and bit into one myself. “It’s fine.” I spoke around the crumbs. “Here you go, Maddie.” She took it, warily, and then shoved it in her own mouth as if I were about to take it away again.

Ellie ate hers more slowly.

“Mine!” Petra shouted, holding up her arms. I gave a mental shrug. I wasn’t going to win any prizes for child nutrition, but I no longer gave a fuck about that. Breaking one in half, I gave her a piece of biscuit too, and then threw a chunk to each of the dogs for good measure.

“Okay, we’re up and running again,” Jack said, as Petra began joyfully stuffing the biscuit into her mouth. For a minute I didn’t realize what he meant, and then I saw that he was holding the tablet, the screen casting a glow onto his face. “I’ve got the app open. Try your PIN first.” I took the tablet from him, selected my username from the little drop-down menu, and put in the PIN Sandra had given me for the home-management app.

You are locked out, flashed up on the screen, and then when I tapped the little i button next to the message, Sorry, you have entered your Happy number incorrectly too many times and are now locked out. Please enter an admin password to override this, or wait 4 hours.

“Ah,” Jack said ruefully. “Easy mistake to make in the circumstances.”

“But wait,” I said, annoyed. “Hang on, that makes no sense. I only entered my pass code once. How can it lock me out for that?” “It doesn’t,” Jack said. “You get three goes, and it warns you. But I suppose with all the noise—” “I only entered it once,” I repeated, and then, when he didn’t reply, I said, more forcefully, “Once!” “Okay, okay,” Jack said mildly, but he looked at me sideways beneath his fringe, something a little appraising in his eyes. “Let me try.” I handed him the tablet, feeling irrationally annoyed. It was clear that he didn’t believe me. So what had happened then? Had someone been trying to log in under my username?

As I watched, Jack switched users and entered his own PIN. The screen lit up briefly, and then he was inside the app.

His screen was laid out differently to mine, I saw. He had some permissions that I didn’t—access to the cameras in the garage, and outside—but not to those in the children’s bedroom and playroom, as I did. The icons for those rooms were grayed out and unavailable. But when he clicked on the kitchen, he was able to dim the lights by tapping on the controls on the app.

The realization was like a little shock.

“Hang on.” The words blurted out before I had thought through how to phrase it. “You can control the lights in here from the app?” “Only if I’m here,” he said, clicking through to another screen. “If you’re a master user—that’s Sandra and Bill, basically—you can control everything remotely, but the rest of us can only control the rooms we’re in. It’s some sort of geolocation thing. If you’re close enough to the panel in the room, you get access to that system.” It made sense, I supposed. If you were close enough to reach a light switch, why not give you access to the rest of the room’s controls. But on the other hand . . . how close was close? We were directly beneath Maddie and Ellie’s room here. Could he control the lights in there from his phone down here? What about outside in the yard?

But I caught myself. This was pointless. He didn’t need to access the controls from the yard. He had a set of keys.

Except . . . what better way to make someone think you weren’t involved . . . when really you were?

I shook my head. I had to stop this. It could have been Ellie, fiddling with the iPad in the middle of the night. Perhaps she had come down to play Candy Crush or watch a movie, and accidentally pressed something she shouldn’t have. It could have been some kind of preprogrammed setting that I’d switched on without realizing, the app version of a butt dial. It could have been Bill and Sandra, if it came to that. If I was going to be paranoid, I might as well go the whole hog, after all. Why stop at random handymen? Why not extend the suspicion to everyone? The fact that they had only just recruited me and had least reason of anyone to drive me away was neither here nor there. Or, for that matter, there were other users. Who knew what permissions Rhiannon might have?

I became suddenly aware that Jack was watching me, his arms folded across his very naked chest. I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in the glass wall of the kitchen—braless in my skimpy top, with my face still pillow-crumpled, and my hair like I’d been dragged through a bush backwards—so far from the neat, buttoned-up professional image I tried to project during the day that the contrast was laughable. I felt my cheeks grow hot.

“God, I’m so sorry Jack. You didn’t have to—” I ground to a halt.

He looked down at himself in turn, seeming to realize his own state of half dress, and gave an awkward laugh, a flush of red staining his cheekbones.

“I should have put something on. I thought you were all being murdered in your beds, so I didn’t really stop to dress . . . Listen, you get the girls to sleep, I’ll put a shirt on, settle the dogs, and then I’ll run some antivirus software on the app.” “You don’t have to do that tonight,” I protested, but he shook his head.

“No, I want to. I can’t for the life of me see why it’s playing up, and I’ll not have you all out of your beds a second time in one night. But you don’t need to wait up for me. I can lock up after myself. Or I can sleep here if you’re worried.” He gestured to the couch. “I can bring over a blanket.” “No!” It came out sharper and more emphatic than I had meant, and I struggled to cover my overreaction. “No, I mean . . . you don’t have to do that. Honestly. I’ll—” Shut up, you stupid girl.

I swallowed.

“I’ll get the girls to bed, and come back down. I won’t be long.”

At least, I hoped I wouldn’t. Petra was looking worryingly wide awake.

It was maybe an hour later, after I’d tucked the girls back into bed for the second time that night, and soothed Petra into a state of not quite sleeping but at least almost there, that I made my way back down to the kitchen. I was half expecting Jack to have packed up and gone, but he was waiting for me, a checked flannel shirt on this time, and a cup of tea in his hand.

“Do you want one?” he asked. For a minute I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, then he raised his cup, and I shook my head.

“No, thanks. I won’t sleep if I have anything caffeinated now.”

“Fair enough. Are you okay?”

I don’t know why it was that simple question that did it. Maybe it was the genuine concern in his voice, or the enormous relief of being with another adult after so many hours spent alone with the children. Maybe it was just the shock of what happened, finally setting in. But I burst into tears.

“Hey.” He stood awkwardly, shoving his hands in his pockets and then taking them out again, and then, as if making up his mind, he crossed the kitchen quickly and put an arm around me. I turned—I couldn’t help it—and buried my face against his shoulder, feeling my whole body shake with the sobs. “Hey, hey there . . . ,” he said again, but this time his voice came to me through his chest wall, deeper and softer, and somehow slower. His hand hovered above my shoulder, and then settled, very gently, on my hair. “Rowan, it’s going to be okay.” It was that one word, Rowan, that brought me back to my senses, reminded me of who I was, and who he was, and what I was doing here. I gulped furiously and took a step back, wiping my eyes on my sleeve.

“Oh my God, Jack, I’m so s-sorry.”

My voice was still shaky and rough from crying, and he put out his hand. For a minute I thought he was going to touch my cheek, and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to pull away, or lean into his caress. Then I realized—he was offering me a tissue. I took it and blew my nose.

“God,” I managed at last, and then I moved across to the kitchen sofa and sat down, feeling my legs about to give way. “Jack, you must think I’m a complete idiot.” “I think you’re a woman who’s had a bad scare and was keeping it together for the bairns. And I also think—” He stopped, biting his lip at that. I frowned.

“What?”

“No, it doesn’t matter.”

“It does.” Suddenly I wanted him to say whatever it was he had been about to say very badly indeed, even though I was more than a little afraid of what it might be. “Tell me,” I pressed, and he sighed.

“I shouldn’t say it. I don’t bad-mouth my employers.”

Oh. So not what I had been half fearing then. Now I was just plain curious.

“But?”

“But . . .” He broke off, chewing his lip, and then seemed to make up his mind. “Ah, fuck it. I’ve said too much already. I think that Sandra and Bill should never have put you in this position. It’s not fair on you, and it’s not fair on the children, if it comes to that.” Oh.

Now it was my turn to feel awkward. What could I say to that?

“I knew what I signed up for,” I said at last.

“Aye, but did you?” He sat down beside me, making the sofa cushions squeak. “I bet they weren’t one hundred percent honest about yon one, eh?” “Who, Maddie?”

He nodded, and I sighed.

“Okay, no, you’re right, they weren’t. Or not totally. But I’m a childcare professional, Jack. It’s nothing I haven’t encountered before.” “Really?”

“Okay. I maybe haven’t encountered anyone quite like Maddie, but she’s just a little girl, Jack. We’re getting to know each other, that’s all. We had a good day today.” It wasn’t quite true though, was it? She had tried to get me sacked, first by luring me into that bloody poison garden, and second by tattling on me to her mother in a way designed to make me look as bad as possible.

“Jack, is there any way it could have been . . .” I stopped myself, and amended what I had been going to say, “one of the kids who set all that stuff off? They were playing with the tablet earlier, is there any way they could have . . . I don’t know . . . preprogrammed it by accident?” Or deliberately, I thought, but did not say.

But he shook his head.

“I don’t think so. There’d be a record of a log-in. And anyway, from what you said, it overrode every single speaker and lighting system in the house. None of the users on this tablet have access rights to do that. You’d need an admin password for that.” “So . . . you’d have to be Bill or Sandra, basically? Is that what you’re saying?” The thought was very odd, and my doubts must have shown on my face. “Could the kids have got hold of their PIN somehow?” “Maybe, but they’re not even down as users on this tablet. Look.” He clicked the little drop-down menu on the home-management app that listed the possible users for this device. Me, Jack, Jean, and a final one marked “Guest.” That was it.

“So what you’re saying is . . . ,” I spoke slowly, trying to think it through, “to get an admin level of access, you wouldn’t just need Sandra’s PIN, you’d need her phone?” “Pretty much, yeah.” He pulled out his own phone, and showed me his access panel. “See? I’m the only user set up on my phone. It’s the way it’s configured.” “And to set up new users on a device . . .”

“You need a specific code. Sandra would have given you one when you came here, no?” I nodded.

“And let me guess, the code can only be generated by . . .”

“By an admin user, yup. That’s about the size of it.”

It made no sense. Had Sandra or Bill done this somehow? It wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility—I had read up on the app when Sandra had first told me about it, and from what I could make out, the whole point of the system was that you could control it from anywhere with internet access—check the CCTV when you were on holiday in Verbier, turn on the lights when you were upstairs and wanted to come down, lower the heating when you were stuck in a traffic jam in Inverness. But why would they?

I remembered what Jack had said when I went to take the girls up to bed, and though I knew I was clutching at straws, I still had to ask the question.

“And the virus scans . . . ?”

He shook his head.

“Nothing on the tablet, at any rate. It’s clean as a whistle.”

“Shit.” I ran my hands through my hair, and he put his hand on my shoulder, touching me again, lightly, but I felt a kind of static charge run between us, making the hairs on my arm prickle, and I shivered lightly.

Jack made a rueful face, misinterpreting my reaction.

“Look at me, blathering away. You must be cold and tired—I’ll let you get to bed.” It wasn’t true. Not anymore. I wasn’t cold, and suddenly I was very far from tired too. What I wanted was a drink, with him—and preferably one as strong as possible. I didn’t usually drink spirits, but it was on the tip of my tongue to mention the bottle of Scotch in the cupboard in the kitchen. But I knew that if I did, I would be starting something very stupid indeed, something I might not be able to stop.

“Okay,” I said at last. “That’s probably good advice. Thank you, Jack.”

I stood up, and he did too, setting down his tea and stretching until I heard his joints crack, and a little sliver of flat stomach showed between the bottom of his shirt and his waistband.

And then, I did something that surprised even myself. Something I had not intended to do, until the instant I found myself doing it.

I stood on tiptoes, and, pulling his shoulder down towards me, I kissed his cheek. I felt the leanness of his skin, the roughness of a day-old beard beneath my lips, and the warmth of him. And I felt something at the core of me clench with wanting.

When I stepped back, his expression was blank surprise, and for a moment I thought I had made a horrible mistake, and the butterflies in my stomach intensified to the point of queasiness. But then his mouth widened into a broad grin, and he bent, and kissed me back, very gently, his lips warm and very soft against my cheek.

“Good night, Rowan. You’re sure you’ll be all right now? You don’t need me to . . . stay?” There was an infinitesimal pause before the last word.

“I’m sure.”

He nodded. And then he turned and left by the utility room door.

I locked it after him, the key turning with a reassuring clunk, and then I tucked the key back into its resting place and stood, watching his silhouette against the light streaming from the stable windows as he walked back to his little flat. As he mounted the stairs to his front door he turned and lifted a hand in farewell, and even though I was not sure he would be able to see me in the darkness, I raised mine in return.

Then he was gone, the door closed behind him, and the outside light clicked off, leaving a shocking, inky darkness in its wake. And I was left standing in there, my skin shivering, and fighting the urge to touch the place on my cheek where his lips had been with the tips of my fingers.

I did not know what he had meant when he offered to stay. What he had been hoping, expecting.

But I knew what I had wanted. And I knew that I had come very close to saying yes.