فصل هجدهم

As the school gate clanged shut, I felt a kind of weak relief come over me, so that I almost sank to the pavement, my back to the iron railings, my face in my hands.

I had done it. I had done it. And now my reward was five hours of something close to relaxation. I still had Petra of course—but five hours with her was nothing compared to Ellie’s uncomfortable misery, and Maddie’s bitter campaign of vengeance.

Somehow, though, I stayed upright and walked back round the corner to the side road, where Jack was waiting in the car, with Petra.

“Success?” he asked as I opened the car door and slid in beside him, and I felt a grin crack my face wide, unable to conceal my own relief.

“Yes. They’re behind bars for the next few hours anyway.”

“See? You’re doing a great job,” he said comfortably, pressing on the accelerator so that we slid away from the curb with the unnervingly silent hum I had come to expect from the car.

“I don’t know about that,” I said, a little bitterly. “It was touch-and-go getting Maddie out to the car, to be honest. But I’ve survived another morning, which is probably the main thing.” “Now, what do you want to do?” Jack asked practically, as we drove towards the center of the little town where the girls’ primary school was. “We can go straight back to the house if you’ve stuff to be getting on with, or we can stop off for a coffee, if you like, and I can show you a wee bit of Carn Bridge.” “A little bit of a tour would be lovely. I’ve not really had a chance to see anything much apart from Heatherbrae yet, and Carn Bridge looked really pretty as we were coming through.” “Aye, it’s a bonny little place. And it’s got a good coffee shop too, the Parritch Pot. It’s down at the other end of the village, but there’s not much in the way of street parking there, so I’ll park up by the kirk, and we can walk down along the high street. And I’ll show you what there is to see.” Ten minutes later, I had wrestled Petra into her pram and we were walking down the main street of Carn Bridge, with Jack pointing out shops and pubs, and nodding at the occasional passerby. It was a quaint little place, somehow built on a smaller scale than you expected from afar, the granite buildings neater and narrower than they seemed from a distance. There were empty shops too; I saw one that had once been a butcher’s and another that looked like it might have been a bookshop or a stationer’s. Jack nodded when I pointed them out.

“There’s plenty of big houses round about, but the little shops still find it hard going. The tourist ones are all right, but the small places can’t compete with the supermarkets for price.” The Parritch Pot was a neat little Victorian tea shop right at the bottom of the high street, with a brass bell that jangled as Jack opened the door and held it for me to maneuver Petra across the threshold.

Inside, a motherly looking woman came out from behind the counter to welcome us.

“Jackie Grant! Well, and it’s a good while since you were in here for a piece of cake. How are you doing, my dear?” “I’m well, Mrs. Andrews, thank you. And how are you?”

“Och, well, I cannae complain. And who’s your lady friend?” She gave me a look I couldn’t quite decipher. There was something . . . well, arch was the closest word I could find to describe it, as if there was something more she could have said but was holding back. Perhaps it was just good old-fashioned curiosity. I wanted to roll my eyes. It wasn’t the 1950s anymore. Surely men and women were allowed to have a cup of tea without setting tongues wagging, even in a little place like Carn Bridge.

“Oh, this is Rowan,” Jack said easily. “Rowan, this is Mrs. Andrews, who runs the tea shop. Rowan is the new nanny up at Heatherbrae, Mrs. Andrews.” “Oh, so you are, my dear,” Mrs. Andrews said, her brow clearing, and she smiled. “Jean McKenzie did tell me, and it slipped clean out my head. Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Let’s hope you’ve more staying power than the other lassies.” “I hear they didn’t last long?” I ventured. Mrs. Andrews laughed and shook her head.

“No, indeed. But you don’t look like the type to be easily scared.”

I pondered her words as I unclipped Petra from her pram and slid her into the high chair Jack had fetched from the back of the tea shop. Was it true? A few days ago I would have said so. But now, as I remembered myself lying there stiff and trembling in bed, listening to the creak . . . creak . . . of footsteps above me, I was not so sure.

“Jack,” I said at last, after we’d placed our order and were waiting for our drinks to appear. “Do you know what’s above my bedroom?” “Above your bedroom?” He looked surprised. “No, I didn’t know there was another floor up there. Is it a storage loft, or a proper attic?” “I don’t know. I’ve never been up there. But there’s a locked door in my room that I’m assuming leads up there, and, well . . .” I swallowed, unsure how to phrase this. “I thought . . . well, I heard some odd noises up there a couple of nights ago.” “Rats?” he asked, one eyebrow cocked, and I shrugged, too embarrassed to tell the truth.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not though. It sounded . . .” I swallowed again, trying not to say the word that hovered on the tip of my tongue—human. “Bigger.” “They make an awful racket in the night, or at least they can do. I’ve a bunch of keys somewhere, do you want me to have a try this afternoon?” “Thanks.” There was a kind of comfort in sharing my fear, however guardedly, though I felt like something of a fool now the words had left my lips. After all, what was I going to find up there, other than dust and old furniture? But it couldn’t hurt, and maybe there was some simple explanation—a window left open, an old chair rocking in the draught, a lamp swinging in the breeze. “That’s really kind.” “There you go, now.” The voice came from behind us, and I turned to see Mrs. Andrews holding two coffees—proper cappuccinos, made by a human being, rather than a bloody app. I set mine to my lips and took a long, hot gulp, feeling it scald the inside of my throat, heating me from within, and for the first time in a few days, I felt my confidence return.

“This is great, thank you,” I said to Mrs. Andrews, and she smiled comfortably.

“Och, you’re welcome. I don’t suppose it’s a patch on Mr. and Mrs. Elincourt’s fancy machine up at Heatherbrae, but we do our best.” “Not at all,” I said with a laugh, thinking of my relief at dealing with a real person for once. “Actually, their coffeemaker is a bit too fancy for me, I can’t get to grips with it.” “From what Jean McKenzie says, the whole house is a bit like that, no? She says that you take your life in your hands trying to turn on the light.” I smiled, exchanging a quick glance with Jack, but said nothing.

“Well, it wouldn’t be my taste, what they’ve done to it, but it’s nice that they took the place on at least,” Mrs. Andrews said at last. She wiped her hands on her apron. “There’s not many round here that would have, with that history.” “What history?” I looked up, startled, and she made a shooing motion with her hand.

“Och, don’t listen to me. I’m just a gossipy auld woman. But there’s something about that house, you know. It’s claimed more than one child. The doctor’s little girl wasn’t the first, by all accounts.” “What do you mean?” I took another gulp of coffee, trying to quell the unease rising inside me.

“Back when it was Struan House,” Mrs. Andrews said. She lowered her voice. “The Struans were a very old family and not quite”—she pursed her lips, primly—“well, not quite right in the head, by the end. One of them killed his wife and child, drowned them both in the bath, and another came back from the war and shot himself with his own rifle.” Jesus. I had a sudden flash of the luxuriously appointed family bathroom at Heatherbrae, with the outsize tub and Moroccan tiles. It couldn’t be the same bathtub, but it might conceivably be the same room.

“I heard there was . . . a poisoning,” I said uncomfortably, and she nodded.

“Aye, that was the doctor, Dr. Grant. He came to the house in the fifties, after the last Struan sold up and moved over the border. He poisoned his little girl, or so they say. Some’ll tell you by accident, others—” But she broke off. Another customer had come in, setting the bell above the door jangling, and Mrs. Andrews smoothed her apron and turned away with a smile.

“But listen to me rattling on. It’s just idle gossip and superstition. You shouldn’t pay any heed. Well, hello, Caroline. And what can I get for you this morning?” As she moved away to serve her other customer, I watched her go, wondering what she had meant. But then I shook myself. She was right. It was just superstition. All houses above a certain age had experienced deaths and tragedies, and the fact that a child had died at Heatherbrae didn’t mean anything.

Still though, Ellie’s words rang in my head as I tied Petra’s bib more firmly under her chin and dug out the pot of rice cakes.

There was another little girl.

We took the long way round back to Heatherbrae House, driving slowly along past peat-dark burns and through sun-dappled pine forests. Petra snoozed in the back as Jack pointed out local landmarks—a ruined castle, an abandoned fort, a Victorian station decommissioned long ago. In the distance the mountains loomed, and I tried to keep track of the peaks that Jack named.

“Do you like hill walking?” he asked, as we waited at a junction with the main road for a lorry to pass, and I realized that I didn’t know the answer to his question.

“I— Well, I’m not really sure. I’ve never done it. I like walking, I guess. Why?”

“Oh . . . well . . .” There was a sudden hesitation in his voice, and when I looked sideways at him, there was a flush of red across his cheekbones. “I just thought . . . you know . . . when Sandra and Bill are back and your weekends are your own again, perhaps we might . . . I could take you up one of the Munros. If you liked the idea.” “I . . . do,” I said, and then it was my turn to blush. “I do like the idea. I mean, if you don’t mind me being slow . . . I suppose I’d have to get boots and stuff.” “You’d need good shoes. And waterproofs. The weather can turn very fast up on the mountain. But—”

His phone gave a little chirrup, and he glanced down at it, and then frowned, and handed it across to me.

“Sorry, Rowan, that’s from Bill. D’you mind telling me what he says? I don’t want to read it while I’m driving, but he doesn’t normally text unless it’s urgent.” I pressed the text on the home screen and a preview flashed up, all I could see without unlocking the phone, but it was enough.

“ ’Jack, urgently need the hard copies of the Pemberton files by tonight. Please drop everything and bring them—’ And that’s where it cuts off.” “Fuck,” Jack said, and then glanced guiltily in the rearview mirror to where Petra was sleeping. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to swear, but that’s my afternoon and evening gone, and most of tomorrow too. I had plans.” I didn’t ask what his plans were. I felt only a sudden swoop of . . . not quite loss . . . not quite fear either . . . but a sort of unease at the realization that he would be gone and I would be quite alone with the children for the best part of twenty-four hours, by the time Jack had driven down, rested, and then driven back.

It meant something else, too, I realized, as we came out of the dark tunnel of pine trees into the June sunlight: no possibility of trying the attic door until he got back.

Jack left almost as soon as we got back, and although I had gratefully accepted his offer to take the dogs with him, and relieve me of the responsibility to feed and walk them on top of everything else, the house had an unfamiliar, quiet feeling to it after they had all gone. I fed Petra and put her down for her nap, and then I sat for a while in the cavernous kitchen, drumming my fingers on the concrete tabletop and watching the changing sky out of the tall windows. It really was an incredible view, and in daylight like this, I could see why Sandra and Bill had hewn the house in half the way they had, sacrificing Victorian architecture for this all-encompassing expanse of hill and moor.

Still, though, it left an odd sensation of vulnerability—the way the foursquare front looked so neat and untouched, while at the back it had been ripped open, exposing all the house’s insides. Like a patient who looked well enough above their clothes, but lift their shirt and you would find their wounds had been left unstitched, bleeding out. There was a strange feeling of split identity too—as though the house was trying hard to be one thing, while Sandra and Bill pulled it relentlessly in the other direction, chopping off limbs, performing open-heart surgery on its dignified old bones, trying to make it into something against its own will—something it was never meant to be, modern and stylish and slick, where it wanted to be solid and self-effacing.

The ghosts wouldn’t like it . . . I heard it again in Maddie’s reedy little voice and shook my head. Ghosts. How absurd. Just folktales and rumors, and a sad old man, living here after the death of his child.

It was more for want of anything else to do that I opened up my phone and typed in “Heatherbrae House, child’s death, poison garden.” Most of the early results were irrelevant, but as I scrolled down and down, I came at last to a local-interest blog, written by some sort of amateur historian.

“STRUAN—Struan House (now renamed Heatherbrae), near Carn Bridge in Scotland, is another curiosity for garden historians, being one of the few remaining poison gardens in the United Kingdom (another being the famous example at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland). Originally planted in the 1950s by the analytical chemist Kenwick Grant, it is thought to feature some of the rarest and most poisonous examples of domestic plants, with a particular focus on varieties native to Scotland. Sadly, the garden was allowed to fall into disrepair after the death of Grant’s young daughter, Elspeth, who died in 1973, age eleven, having, according to local legend, accidentally ingested one of the plants in the garden. Although in its day occasionally open to researchers and members of the public, Dr. Grant closed the garden completely after his daughter’s death, and after he himself passed away in 2009, the house was sold to a private buyer. Since the sale, Struan has been renamed Heatherbrae House, and it’s believed that it has been the subject of extensive remodeling. It is unknown what remains of the poison garden, but it is to be hoped that the current owners appreciate the historical and botanical importance of this piece of Scottish history and maintain Dr. Grant’s legacy with the respect it deserves.” There were no photographs, but I returned to Google and typed in “Dr. Kenwick Grant.” It was an unusual name, and there were few results, but most of the pictures that came up seemed to be of the same man. The first was a black-and-white picture of a man aged perhaps forty, with a neatly clipped goatlike beard and small wire-framed spectacles, standing in front of what looked like the wrought iron gate of the walled garden where Maddie, Ellie, and I had entered the day before. He was not smiling, his face had the look of one that didn’t smile easily, with an expression naturally serious in repose, but there was a kind of pride in his stance.

The next photograph made a sad contrast. It was another black-and-white shot, recognizably the same man, but this time Dr. Grant was likely in his fifties. His expression was totally different, a distorted mask of emotion that could have been grief, or fear, or anger, or a mix of all three. He seemed to be running towards an unseen photographer, his hand outstretched, either to push the camera away or shield his own face, it was not clear which. Behind the goatlike beard his mouth was twisted into a snarling grimace that made me flinch, even through the tiny screen, and the passage of decades.

The final photograph was in color, and it was a shot that seemed to have been taken through the bars of a gate. It showed an elderly man, stooped and bent, wearing a buff overall and a wide-brimmed hat that shaded his face. He was extremely thin, to the point of emaciation, and leaning on a stick, and his glasses were thick and fogged, but he was staring fiercely at the person taking the photo, his free hand upraised in a bony fist, as though threatening the viewer. I clicked on the picture, trying to find out the context for the shot, but there was none. It was just a Pinterest page, with no information on where the picture had been found. Dr. Kenwick Grant, the caption read, 2002.

As I closed down the phone, my overwhelming emotion was a kind of desperate sadness—for Dr. Grant, for his daughter, and for this house, where it had all happened.

Unable to sit in silence with my thoughts any longer, I got up, put the baby monitor in my pocket, and, grabbing a ball of caterers’ string from the drawer by the cooker, I left the house by the utility room door, tracing the path the girls had shown me the day before.

The sun of the morning had gone in, and I was cold by the time I reached the cobbled path that led to the poison garden. It was strange to think it was June—down in London I would have been sweating in short skirts and sleeveless tops, and cursing the shitty air-con at Little Nippers. Up here, almost halfway to the arctic circle, I was beginning to regret not taking my coat. The baby monitor was silent in my pocket as I reached the gate and slipped my hand through the metalwork to try to trip the catch, as Ellie had done.

It was more difficult than she had made it look. It was not just the fact that the hole in the wrought iron was too narrow for my hand to fit comfortably, it was also the angle. Even after I had forced my hand through, swearing as the rust ripped skin off my knuckles, I could not get my fingers to the catch.

I changed position, kneeling on the damp cobbles, feeling the chill strike up through the thin material of my sheer tights, and at last managed to get a fingertip to the tongue of the latch. I pressed, pressed harder . . . and then the gate opened with a clang and I almost fell forward onto the worn bricks.

It was hard to believe that I had ever mistaken it for a regular garden. Now that I knew its history, the warning signs were everywhere. Fat, black laurel berries, the thin needles of yew, straggling patches of self-seeded foxglove, clumps of nettles, which I had taken to be weeds when I first entered the garden but which I now saw bore a rusted metal tag dug deep into the earth labeled Urtica dioica. And others too that I did not recognize—a plant with flamboyant mauve flowers, another that brushed my leg with a sensation like tiny needles. A patch of something that looked like sage but must have been something very different. And, as I pushed open the door of a tumbledown shed, a profusion of mushrooms and toadstools, still sprouting gamely in the dark.

I could not suppress a shudder as I drew the door quietly shut, feeling the damp wood grate on the flags. So many poisons—some tempting, some decidedly not. Some familiar, and some I was certain I had never seen before. Some so beautiful I wanted to break off a branch and stick it in a jug in the kitchen—except that I did not dare. Even the familiar plants in these surroundings looked strange and ominous—no longer grown for their lovely flowers and colors, but for their deadliness.

I hugged my arms around my body as I walked, partly to protect myself, but the garden was so overgrown that it was impossible to avoid brushing up against the plants completely. The touch of the leaves felt like prickles on my skin, and I was unable to tell anymore which plants were toxic to touch, or whether it was pure paranoia on my part that sent my skin itching and tingling when I brushed past.

It was only when I turned to leave that I noticed something else—a set of pruning shears, sitting on the low brick wall holding back one of the beds. They were new and bright, not in the least rusted, and looking up, I saw that the bush above my head had been pruned—not much, but enough to clear the path. And further up, I saw that a piece of garden twine had been used to hold back a swag of creeper.

In fact, the more I looked, the more I was sure—this garden was not as neglected as it appeared. Someone had been tending to it—and not Maddie or Ellie. No child would have thought of neatly cutting back that hanging branch—they would have snapped it off, or just ducked under it, if they were even tall enough to notice.

So who then? Not Sandra. I was sure of that. Jean McKenzie? Jack Grant?

The name sounded in my head with a curious chime. Jack . . . Grant.

It wasn’t an uncommon surname, particularly around here, but . . . still. Dr. Kenwick Grant. Could it really be coincidence?

As I stood, wondering, the baby monitor in my pocket gave a little grumbling squawk, recalling me to reality, and I remembered what I had come here to do.

Picking up the shears, I hurried back to the gate, and pulled it firmly shut behind myself. The clang as it closed set a flock of birds rising into the sky from pine trees up the slope, and seemed to echo back at me from the hills opposite, but I was in too much of a hurry now to care.

Taking the string out of my pocket, I clipped off a generous length and then I stood on tiptoes and began to wind it round and round the top of the gate, above the height of my own head, where no child could possibly reach, twining it in and out of the ornate fitting and round the brick lintel above, until at last the string was used up, and the gate was totally secure. Then I tied it in a granny knot, wrapping the ends around my fingers and pulling the string tight until my fingertips went white.

The baby monitor in my pocket wailed again, more determinedly this time, but I was sure now that the gate was secure, and that nothing short of a ladder would enable Maddie and Ellie to break in this time. Dropping the shears into my pocket, I picked up my phone and pressed the Happy app icon.

“Coming, Petra. There, there, sweetheart, no need to cry, I’m coming.”

And I ran up the cobbled path to the house.

The next few hours were taken up with Petra, and then figuring out how to drive the Tesla to collect the girls from school. Jack had taken the Elincourts’ second car, a Land Rover, with him to meet Bill, and had given me a quick crash course in driving the Tesla before he left, but it was an undeniably different style and it took me a few miles to get used to it—no clutch, no gears, and a strange slowing every time you took your foot off the accelerator.

The girls were both tired after their day at school. They said nothing as we drove home, and the afternoon and evening passed without incident. They ate supper, took turns playing on the tablet, and then got into their pajamas and climbed into bed with barely a peep. When I went up at eight to turn out their lights and tuck them in, I heard an adult’s voice, coming over the speakers.

At first, I thought that they were listening to an audiobook, but then I heard Maddie say something, her small voice inaudible through the door, and the amplified voice on the speakers replied, “Oh darling, well done! Ten out of ten! I’m very proud of you. And what about you, Ellie? Have you been practicing your spellings too?” It was Sandra. She had dialed into the children’s room and was talking to them before they fell asleep.

For a moment I stood, hovering outside the door, my hand on the doorknob, listening to their conversation, half hoping—half fearing—to hear something about myself.

But instead, I heard Sandra tell the girls to snuggle down, the lights dimmed, and she began to sing a lullaby.

There was something so loving, so personal about the simple act, Sandra’s voice wavering over the high notes, and tripping over an awkward lyric, that I was left feeling like an eavesdropper. I wanted, more than anything, to open the door, tiptoe in, and cuddle Maddie and Ellie, kiss their hot little foreheads, tell them how lucky they were to have a mother who at least wanted to be there, even if she couldn’t.

But I knew that would break the illusion that their mother was really present, and I backed away. If Sandra wanted to speak to me, no doubt she would dial down to the kitchen after she had finished.

While I ate and tidied up, I waited, slightly nervously, for the sound of her voice, crackling over the intercom, but it didn’t come. By 9:00 p.m. the house was silent and I locked up and went to bed with a feeling like walking on eggshells.

After I had done my teeth and turned out the lights, I lay down in bed, feeling my limbs ache with weariness. My phone was in my hand, but instead of plugging it in to charge and going straight to sleep, I found myself googling Dr. Grant again.

I stared at his photo for a long time, thinking of Mrs. Andrews’s words in the café. There was something about the contrast between that first picture and the last that was almost shocking, something that spoke of long nights of grief and agony—perhaps even in this very room. What had it been like to live here all those years, with the local gossip swirling around him, and the memories of his daughter so stark and painful?

Returning to the search screen, I typed in “Elspeth Grant death Carn Bridge” and waited as the links came up.

There was no photo—at least none that I could find. And she had not had much of an obituary, just a passage in the Carn Bridge Observer (now defunct), stating that Elspeth Grant, much loved daughter of Dr. Kenwick Grant and the late Ailsa Grant, had died in St. Vincent’s Cottage Hospital on 21st October 1973, aged eleven years.

Another brief piece a few weeks later, this time in the Inverness Gazette, recorded the results of a postmortem and inquest on Elspeth’s death. It seemed she had died from eating Prunus laurocerasus, or cherry laurel berries, which had been accidentally made into jam. The berries were apparently easily mistaken for cherries or elderberries by inexperienced foragers, and it was thought that the child had gathered them herself and brought them to the housekeeper, who had simply tipped them into the pan without checking. Dr. Grant never ate jam himself, preferring porridge and salt, the housekeeper did not live in and took her meals at her own house in the village, and Elspeth’s nanny had resigned her post almost two months before the incident, so Elspeth was the only person to ingest the poison. She had become unwell almost straightaway and had died of multiple organ failure, in spite of strenuous efforts to save her.

A verdict of misadventure was brought, and no charges were filed as a result of her death.

So. Elspeth had been the only person who was ever in danger of eating that jam. I could see why gossip had arisen—though quite why it had settled on Dr. Grant, and not the unnamed housekeeper, was unclear. Perhaps it had been a case of local people looking after their own. And what of the nanny? She had resigned “just two months before,” according to the writer of the piece, who managed to put the simple phrase in such a way as to make it sound both innocent and suggestive, but presumably she could have had nothing to do with the incident, or it would have been raised at the inquest. Her absence had been noted purely in connection with the fact that Elspeth had been unsupervised at the time of picking the berries, and therefore, by inference, was more likely to make a slip concerning identification of the plants.

The more I pondered the idea, though, the more problems there seemed to be with the suggestion that Elspeth had gathered the berries by accident. I was a 1990s child of the suburbs, totally unused to fruit picking, and even I had a vague idea of what laurel looked like compared to elderberry. Would the daughter of a poisons expert with a locked garden explicitly dedicated to deadly plants really make such a slip?

Rereading the piece, I felt a sudden surge of sympathy for the nanny, the missing link in the case. She was not interviewed. Whatever had become of her was not stated. But she had missed, by just a few weeks, the possibility of being embroiled in scandal. What future was there for a nanny whose child had died in her care, after all? A very bleak one indeed.

I’m not sure when I finally drifted off, my phone still in my hand, but I know that it was very late when a sudden sound jerked me from sleep. It was a ding-dong noise, like a doorbell, not one of my usual alerts. I sat up, blinking and rubbing my eyes, and then realized the noise was coming from my phone. I stared at the screen. The Happy app was flashing. Doorbell sounding, read the screen. It came again, a low bing-bong that seemed to be able to override all my do-not-disturb settings. When I pressed the icon a message flashed up. Open door? Confirm / Cancel.

I hastily pressed cancel, and clicked through to the camera icon. The screen showed me a view of the front door, but the outside light was not on, and inside the shelter of the porch I could see nothing but grainy pixelated darkness. Had Jack come back? Had he forgotten his keys? Either way, as the doorbell sounded for the third time, I could hear the chimes filtering up the stairwell as well as coming out of my phone, and I knew I had to answer it before the noise woke the girls.

The room was unnaturally cold, and I pulled on my dressing gown before padding quietly downstairs, my feet soft on the thick carpet runner, picking my way in the semi darkness but not wanting to turn on the lights and risk waking the children. In the hallway I had a moment’s struggle with the thumb panel, and then the door swung silently open to reveal . . . nothing.

It was quite dark. The Land Rover’s parking space was still empty, and none of the motion-sensitive security lights around the yard were on, though the porch light flicked on as soon as I stepped over the threshold, detecting my presence. I shaded my eyes against its harsh glare and peered across the yard and down the drive, shivering slightly in the cool night air. Nothing. There were no lights on in Jack’s flat either. Had something triggered it by mistake?

Closing the door, I made my way slowly back up towards my bedroom, but I was barely halfway up the second flight when the bell sounded again.

Damn it.

With a sigh, I belted my dressing gown tighter and made my way back downstairs, hurrying this time.

But when I wrenched open the door, again, there was no one there.

I slammed the door harder than I meant to this time, the tiredness making my frustration boil over for a second, and I stood in the dark of the hallway, holding my breath and listening for a sound from upstairs, the rising siren of Petra’s wail perhaps. But none came.

Nevertheless, this time, instead of setting back upstairs to my own room, I stopped and peered in at Petra, sleeping peacefully, and then into Maddie and Ellie’s room. In the soft glow of their night-light I could see both of them lying fast asleep, sweaty hair strewn across the pillows, their cherubic little mouths open, their soft snores barely disturbing the quiet. They looked so small and vulnerable in sleep, both of them, and my heart clenched at my anger towards Maddie that morning. I told myself that tomorrow I would do better—that I would remember how young she was, how disorienting it must be to be left with a woman she barely knew. Either way, it was clearly not one of them playing with the doorbell, and I shut the door softly and made my way back upstairs to my room.

It was still very cold, and as I closed the door behind me, the curtains billowed out, and I realized why. The window was open.

I frowned as I walked across to it.

It was open, and not just slightly, as if someone had wanted to air the room, but completely open, the bottom sash pushed up as high as it would go. Almost—the thought came unbidden—as if someone had been leaning out to smoke a cigarette, though that was absurd.

No wonder the room was cold. Well, it was easily solvable at least—easier than battling with the control panel at any rate. The curtains, doors, lights, gates, and even the coffee machine in this place might be automated, but the windows at least were still Victorian originals, blessedly operated by hand. Thank God.

I yanked the sash down, drew the brass catch across, and then scampered back into the still-warm sanctuary of the feather duvet, shivering pleasurably as I snuggled into its folds.

I was drifting back off to sleep when I heard it . . . not the doorbell this time, but a single, solitary creeeeak.

I sat up in bed, my phone clutched to my breast. Shit. Shit shit shit.

But the next sound did not come. Had I misheard? Was it not the footsteps that had woken me the night before, but something else . . . ? Just a branch in the wind, perhaps, or an expanding floorboard?

I could hear nothing apart from the whoosh of my own blood in my own ears, and at last I lay slowly back down, still clutching my phone in my hand, and shut my eyes against the darkness.

But my senses were on high alert, and sleep seemed impossible. For more than forty minutes I lay there, feeling my pulse thumping, feeling my thoughts race with a mixture of paranoia and wild superstitions.

And then, half as I’d feared, half as I’d been waiting for, it came again.

Creeeeak . . .

And then, after the smallest of pauses, creak . . . creak . . . creak . . .

This time there was no doubt—it was pacing.

My heart leapt into my throat with a kind of nauseating lurch, and my pulse sped up so fast that for a moment I thought I would faint, but then anger took over. I jumped out of bed and ran to the locked door in the corner of the room, where I knelt, peering through the keyhole, my heart like a drum in my chest.

I felt absurdly vulnerable, kneeling there in my nightclothes with one eye wide open and pressed to a dark hole, and for a moment I had a sick, jolting fantasy of someone shoving something through the hole, a toothpick perhaps, or a sharpened pencil, roughly piercing my cornea, and I fell back, blinking, my eye watering with the dusty draft.

But there was nothing there. No toothpick maliciously blinding me. Nothing to see either. Just the unending blackness, and the cool, dust-laden breeze of stale attic air. Even if there was a turn in the stair, or a closed door at the top, with a light on in the attic itself, some light would have escaped to pollute the inky dark of the stairs. But there was nothing. Not even the smallest glimmer. If there was someone up there, whatever they were doing, they were doing it in the dark.

Creak . . . creak . . . creak . . . it came again, unbearable in its regularity. Then a pause, and then again, creak . . . creak . . . creak . . .

“I can hear you!” I shouted at last, unable to sit there listening in silence and fear any longer. I put my mouth to the keyhole, my voice shaking with a mix of angry terror. “I can hear you! What the fuck are you doing up there, you sicko? How dare you? I’m calling the police so you’d better get the fuck out of there!” But the steps didn’t even falter. My voice died away as if I had shouted into an empty void. Creak . . . creak . . . creak . . . And then, just as before, a little pause, and they resumed without the slightest loss of rhythm. Creak . . . creak . . . creak . . . And I knew in truth that of course I wouldn’t call the police. What the fuck could I say? “Oh, please, Constable, there’s a creaking sound coming from my attic”? There was no police station closer than Inverness, and they would hardly be taking routine calls in the middle of the night. My only option was 999—and even in my shaking state of fear, I had a pretty good idea what the operator would say if a hysterical woman rang the emergency number in the middle of the night claiming spooky sounds were coming from her attic.

If only Jack were here, if only someone were here, apart from three little girls I was paid to protect, not scare even further.

Oh God. Suddenly I could not bear it any longer, and I understood what dark terrors had driven those four previous nannies out of their post and away. To lie here, night after night, listening, waiting, staring into the darkness at that locked door, that open keyhole gaping into blackness . . .

There was nothing I could do. I could go and sleep in the living room, but if the noises started down there as well, I thought I might lose it completely, and there was something almost worse about the idea of those sounds continuing up in the attic while I, ignorant, slept down below. At least if I was here, watching, listening, whatever was up there could not . . .

I swallowed in the darkness, my throat dry. My palms were sweating, and I could not finish the thought.

I would not sleep again tonight, I knew that now.

Instead, I wrapped myself in the duvet, shivering hard, turned on the light, and sat, with my phone still in my hand, listening to the steady, rhythmic sound of the feet pacing above me. And I thought of Dr. Grant, the old man who had lived here before, the man Sandra and Bill had done their very best to get rid of, painting and scouring and remodeling until there was barely a trace of him left, except for that horrible poison garden, behind its locked gate.

And except, perhaps, whatever paced that attic in the night.

I heard the words again, in Maddie’s cold little matter-of-fact voice, as if she were beside me, whispering in my ear. After a while he stopped sleeping. He just used to pace backwards and forwards all night long. Then he went mad. People do go mad, you know, if you stop them from sleeping for long enough . . .

Was I going mad? Was that what this was?

Jesus. This was ridiculous. People didn’t go mad from two nights’ lack of sleep. I was being completely melodramatic.

And yet, as the footsteps passed above me again, slow and relentless, I felt a kind of panic rise up inside me, possessing me, and I could not stop my eyes turning towards the locked door, imagining it opening, the slow tread, tread of old feet on the stairs inside, and then that cadaverous, hollow face coming towards me in the darkness, the bony arm outstretched.

Elspeth . . .

It was a sound not coming from above, but in my own mind—a death rattle cry of a grief-stricken father for his lost child. Elspeth . . .

But the door did not open. No one came. And yet still above me, hour after hour, those steps continued. Creak . . . creak . . . creak . . . the ceaseless pacing of someone unable to rest.

I could not bring myself to turn out the light. Not this time. Not with those ceaseless, restless footsteps above me.

Instead, I lay there, on my side, facing the locked door, my phone in my hand, watching, waiting, until the floor beneath the window opposite my bed began to lighten with the coming of dawn, and at last I got up, stiff-limbed and nauseous with tiredness, and made my way down to the warmth of the kitchen to make myself the strongest cup of coffee I could bear to drink, and try to face the day.