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“Maddie, Ellie, come on!” I was standing in the hallway, keys in hand as Maddie came flying down the stairs with her coat and shoes already on. “Oh, well done, sweetie. You did your shoes yourself!” She slipped past, avoiding my outstretched arms, but Ellie, coming out of the downstairs toilet, was less quick and I caught her up, growling like a bear, kissed her squashy little tummy, then set her squealing and laughing back onto the floor, and watched as she scampered out of the front door after her sister to clamber into the car.

I turned back, to pick up their schoolbags, and as I did, I almost collided with Mrs. McKenzie, standing with her arms folded in the archway that led to the kitchen.

“Shit!” The word slipped out without meaning to, and I flushed, annoyed with myself for giving her more ammunition for her dislike of me. “I mean, gosh, I didn’t hear you come in, Mrs. McKenzie. Sorry, you startled me.” “I came in the back way, I had mucky shoes,” was all she said, but there was something a little bit softer than usual in her face, as her eyes followed the girls out to the car. “You’re . . . ,” she stopped, and then shook her head. “Never mind.” “No, what?” I said, feeling annoyed. “Come on, if you’ve got something to say . . .” She pursed her lips, and I folded my arms, waiting. Then, quite unexpectedly, she smiled, transforming her rather grim face, making her look years younger.

“I was just going to say, you’re doing very well with those girls. Now, you’d best be getting a move on, or you’ll be late.” * * *

As I drove back from Carn Bridge Primary School, Petra strapped into the car seat behind me, pointing out the window and babbling her half-talk, half-nonsense syllables to herself, I found myself remembering that first drive back from the station with Jack—the evening sunset gilding the hills, the quiet hum of the Tesla as we wound through the close-cropped fields, filled with grazing sheep and Highland cows, and over stone bridges. It was gray and drizzling today, and the landscape felt very different—bleak and raw and entirely un-summer-like. Even the cows in the fields looked depressed, their heads lowered, rain dripping off the tips of their horns.

When the gate swung inwards and we began to climb the winding drive up to the house, I had a sharp flash of déjà vu back to that first evening—the way I had sat there beside Jack, scarcely able to breathe with hope and wanting.

We swung around the final curve of the drive, and the squat gray facade of the house came into view, and I remembered too the rush of emotion I had felt on seeing it for the first time, golden and warm and full of possibilities.

It looked very different today. Not full of the potential for a new life, new opportunities, but as gray and forbidding as a Victorian prison—only I knew that was a kind of a lie as well, that the Victorian facade presented to the driveway was only half the story, and that if I walked around to the back, I would see a house that had been ripped apart and patched back together with glass and steel.

Last of all, my gaze went to the roof, the stone tiles wet and slick with rain. The window Jack had shut was not visible from here; it opened onto the inner slope of the roof, but I knew that it was there, and the thought made me shiver.

There was no sign of Jean McKenzie’s car in the drive—she must have already left for the day—and both Jack and the dogs were nowhere to be seen, and somehow, what with everything that had happened, I could not bring myself to enter the house alone. It had come to something, I thought, as I parked the car and unclipped Petra from her seat, that even fending off the dogs from trying to put their noses up my skirt would have been a welcome distraction from the silent watchfulness of that house, with its glassy egg-shaped eyes observing me from every corner.

At least out here I could think and feel and speak without watching my every word, my every expression, my every mood.

I could be me, without fearing that I would slip up.

“Come on,” I said to Petra. Her buggy was in the boot of the car, and I opened it up and slid her in, clipping the rain cover over her. “Let’s go for a walk.” “Me walk!” Petra shouted, pushing her hands against the plastic, but I shook my head.

“No, honey, it’s too wet, and you’ve not got your waterproofs on. You stay snug and dry in there.” “Puggle!” Petra said, pointing through the plastic. “Jumpin muggy puggle!” It took me a minute to realize what she was saying, but then I followed her gaze to the huge pool of water that had collected on the gravel in the old stable yard, and understanding clicked.

Muddy puddles. She wanted to jump in muddy puddles.

“Oh! Like Peppa Pig, you mean?”

She nodded vigorously.

“You haven’t got your Wellies on, but look—”

I began to walk faster, and then jog, and then with an enormous splash, I ran, buggy and all, through the puddle, feeling the water spray up all around us and patter down on my anorak and the buggy’s rain cover.

Petra screamed with laughter.

“Again! More puggle!”

There was another puddle farther around the side of the house and obligingly I ran through that too, and then another on the graveled path down towards the shrubbery.

By the time we reached the kitchen garden, I was soaked and laughing, but also getting surprisingly cold, and the house was beginning to seem a little bit more welcoming. Full of cameras and malfunctioning tech it might be, but at least it was warm and dry, and out here my fears of the night before seemed not just silly, but laughable.

“Puggle!” Petra shouted, bouncing up and down underneath her clips. “More puggle!” But I shook my head, laughing too.

“No, that’s enough, sweetie, I’m wet! Look!” I came round to stand in front of her, showing her my soaked jeans, and she laughed again, her little face scrunched up and distorted through the crumpled plastic.

“Woan wet!”

Woan. It was the first time she had made an attempt at my name, and I felt my heart contract with love, and a kind of sadness too—for everything I could not tell her.

“Yes!” I said, and there was a lump in my throat, but my smile was real. “Yes, Rowan is wet!” It was as I was turning the buggy around to start the climb back up to the house that I realized how far we had come—almost all the way down the path that led to the poison garden. I glanced over my shoulder at the garden as I began to push the buggy up the steep brick path—and then stopped.

For something had changed since my last visit.

Something was missing.

It took me a minute to put my finger on it—and then I realized. The string tying up the gate had gone.

“Just a second, Petra,” I said, and ignoring her protests of “More puggles!” I put the brake on the buggy and ran back down the path to the iron gate, the gate where Dr. Grant had been photographed, standing proudly before his research playground, so many years ago, the gate I had tied up securely, in a knot too high for little hands to reach.

The thick white catering string had gone. Not just untied, or snipped and thrown aside, but gone completely.

Someone had undone my careful precautions.

But who? And why?

The thought nagged at me as I walked slowly back up the hill to where Petra was still sitting, growing increasingly fretful, and it continued to nag as I pushed the buggy laboriously back up the hill, to where the house was waiting.

By the time I reached the front door, Petra was cross and grizzling, and looking at my watch I saw that it was long past her snack time, and in fact getting on for lunch. The buggy’s wheels were caked with mud, but since I had left the key to the utility room on the inside, I had no option other than the front door, so at last I got her out of the buggy, folded it awkwardly with one hand, holding Petra against my hip with the other to stop her from running off in search of more puddles, and left it in the porch. Then I pressed my thumb to the white glowing panel, and stood back as the door swung silently open.

The smell of frying bacon hit me instantly.

“Hello?”

I put Petra down cautiously on the bottom stair, shut the door, and prized off my muddy boots.

“Hello? Who’s there?”

“Oh, it’s you.” The voice was Rhiannon’s, and as I picked up Petra and began to make my way through to the kitchen, she came out of the doorway, holding a dripping bacon sandwich in one hand. She looked terrible, green around the gills and with dark shadows under her eyes as if she’d slept even less than me.

“Oh, you’re back,” I said unnecessarily, and she rolled her eyes and stalked past me to the stairs, taking a great bite of sandwich as she did.

“Hey,” I called after her as a blob of brown sauce hit the tiled floor with a splat. “Hey! Take a plate, can’t you?” But she was already gone, loping up the stairs towards her room.

As she passed though I caught a whiff of something else—low and masked by the scent of bacon, but so odd and out of place, and yet so familiar, that it stopped me in my tracks.

It was a sweet, slightly rotten smell that jerked me sharply back to my own teenage years, though it still took me a minute to pin down. When the association finally clicked into place, though, I was certain—it was the cherry-ripe reek of cheap alcohol, leaching out of someone’s skin, the morning after it’s been drunk.

Shit.

Shit.

Part of me wanted to mutter that it was none of my business—that I was a nanny and had been hired for my expertise with younger children—that I had no experience with teenagers, and no idea of what Sandra and Bill would consider appropriate. Did fourteen-year-olds drink now? Was that considered okay?

But the other part of me knew that I was in loco parentis here. Whether or not Sandra would be concerned, I had seen enough to worry me. And there were plenty of red flags about Rhiannon’s behavior. But the question was, what should I do about it. What could I do about it?

The questions nagged at me as I made myself and Petra a sandwich and then put her down for her nap. I could go and question Rhiannon—but I was pretty sure she’d have a ready excuse, assuming she deigned to talk to me.

Then I remembered. Cass. If nothing else, she would be able to explain the exact sequence of the night’s events to me, and maybe give me an idea of whether I was ascribing more to this than I should. A bunch of fourteen-year-old girls at a birthday party . . . it wasn’t impossible Cass had supplied some alcopops herself, and Rhiannon had just drunk more than her fair share.

Cass’s return text was still in my list of messages, and I scrolled down until I found it, and pulled out the number. Then I waited while it rang.

“Yup?” The voice was rough, and Scottish, and very male.

I blinked, looked at the phone to check I had dialed the right number, and then put it back to my ear.

“Hello?” I said, cautiously. “Who is this?”

“I’m Craig,” said the voice. It didn’t sound like a kid, the voice had to be someone at least twenty, maybe older. And it definitely didn’t sound like anyone’s mum, or dad for that matter. “More to the fucking point, who the fuck are you?” I was too shocked to reply. For a second I simply sat there, mouth open, trying to figure out what to say.

“Hello?” Craig said, irritably. “Hellooo?” And then, beneath his breath, “Stupid cunts wi’ their fucking wrong numbers.” And then he hung up.

I shut my mouth and walked slowly through to the kitchen, still trying to figure out what had just happened.

Plainly, whoever that number belonged to, it wasn’t Elise’s mum. Which meant . . . well it could have meant that Rhiannon had written it down wrong, except that I had texted that number and got back a confirmation, supposedly from “Cass.” Which meant that Rhiannon had been lying to me.

Which also meant that very probably, she hadn’t been out with Elise at all. Instead, she had very likely been with Craig.

Fuck.

The tablet was lying on the kitchen island, and I picked it up and tried to compose an email to Sandra and Bill.

The problem was, I didn’t know what to begin with. There was too much too say. Should I start with Rhiannon? Or Maddie’s behavior? Or should I lead with my concerns about the attic? The noises, and the way Jack and I had broken in, and the crazy writing?

What I wanted to tell them was everything—from the dead, rotten smell that still hung in my nostrils, and the broken shards of the doll’s head in the rubbish bin, right through to Maddie’s scribbled prison-cell drawing, and my conversation with Craig.

Something is wrong, I wanted to write. No, scrap that, everything is wrong. But . . . how could I tell them about Rhiannon and Maddie without seeming like I was criticizing their parenting? Let alone, how could I say what I had seen and heard in this house without being dismissed as just another superstitious nanny? How could I expect to persuade someone who hadn’t even seen the inside of that creepy, demented room?

The subject line first then. Anything I could think of seemed either hopelessly inadequate or ridiculously dramatic, and in the end I settled on An update from Heatherbrae.

Okay. Okay. Calm and factual. That was good. Now for the body of the email.

Dear Sandra and Bill, I wrote, and then sat back and nibbled at the fraying edge of the bandage on my finger, trying to think what to put next. First of all, I should tell you that Rhiannon arrived back this morning safe and sound, but I have a few concerns about her account of her trip to Elise’s.

Okay, that was good. That was clear and factual and nonaccusatory. But then how to segue from that into Stupid cunts wi’ their fucking wrong numbers.

Let alone from that to

we hate you

There angry

GO AWAY

We hite you

Most of all, how to explain that I would not—could not—sleep in that room again, listen to those footsteps pacing above, breathe the same air as those rotted dusty feathers.

In the end I just sat there, staring at the screen, remembering the slow creak . . . creak . . . on the boards above me, and it was only when I heard Petra’s cranky wail coming over the intercom and looked at the clock that I realized it was time to pick up Maddie and Ellie from school.

Gone to get the girls I tapped out on the messaging screen to Rhiannon, we need to talk when I get back. And then, leaving the email unsent on the tablet, I ran upstairs to change Petra and bundle her into the car.

I didn’t think of the email again until nearly 9:00 p.m. The afternoon had been a good one—Maddie and Ellie had both been delighted to see Rhiannon, and she’d been touchingly sweet with them—a far cry from the glossy, entitled private school brat she played with me. She was visibly hungover, but she played Barbies with them in the playroom for a couple of hours, ate some pizza, and then disappeared upstairs while I did battle with baths and bed and then tucked the girls in with a kiss and turned out the lights.

When I came downstairs I was gearing myself up for the promised discussion, trying to imagine what Rowan the Perfect Nanny would have done. Firm but clear. Don’t lead with sanctions and accusations, get her to talk.

But Rhiannon was waiting in the kitchen, tapping her nails on the counter, and I did a double take at what she was wearing. Full makeup, heels, miniskirt, and a midriff-baring top that showed off a pierced navel.

Oh shit.

“Um,” I began, but Rhiannon forestalled me.

“I’m going out.”

For a second I had no idea what to say. Then I pulled myself together.

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I do.”

I smiled. I could afford to smile. It was growing dark. I had the keys to the Tesla in my pocket, and the nearest station was the best part of ten miles.

“Are you planning to walk in those heels?” I asked. But Rhiannon smiled back.

“No, I’ve got a lift coming.”

Double shit.

“Okay, look, Rhiannon, this is very funny and everything, but you do know there’s absolutely no way I can let you do that. I’ll have to call your parents. I have to tell them—” Oh fuck this, fuck accusations, I had to say something to make her realize she’d been rumbled. “I have to tell them you came home stinking of alcohol.” I expected the words to act like a punch to the gut, but she barely reacted.

“I don’t think you should do that,” was all she said.

But I had already picked up my phone.

I hadn’t checked it since before supper, and to my surprise, there was an email icon flashing. It was from Sandra.

I pressed it, in case it was something I should know about before I spoke to her, and then blinked in puzzlement as the subject header came up.

Re: An update from Heatherbrae

What? Had I sent the email without meaning to? I had logged into my personal Gmail on the children’s tablet, the one they used for playing games, and had a horrible feeling that I had forgotten to log out. Could Petra or one of the girls have accidentally pressed send?

Panic-stricken, I opened up Sandra’s reply, expecting something along the lines of ?? What’s going on? but it was totally different.

Thanks for the update Rowan, sounds good. Glad Rhiannon had a fun time with Elise. Bill is off to Dubai tonight, and I’m at a client dinner, but do text if anything urgent and I’ll try to FaceTime the girls tomorrow. X It didn’t make sense. At least, it didn’t until I scrolled down a little further and looked at the email I had supposedly sent, at 2:48 p.m., a good twenty minutes after I’d left to collect Maddie and Ellie.

Dear Bill and Sandra, just an update from home. All is good, Rhiannon is back safe and sound from Elise’s house, and she seems to have had a great time.

We’ve had a very nice afternoon and she’s a credit to you both. Maddie and Ellie both send love.

Rowan.

There was total silence and then I turned to Rhiannon.

“You little shit.”

“Charming,” she drawled. “Is that the kind of language they expected at Little Nippers?” “Little—what?” How did she know where I’d worked? But then I pulled myself together, refusing to be derailed. “Look, don’t try to change the subject. This is utterly unacceptable, and stupid to boot. First of all, I know about Craig.” A look of shock flickered across Rhiannon’s face at that. She recovered herself quickly, her expression back to bored indifference almost instantly. However, I had seen it and I couldn’t stop a triumphant smile from spreading across my own face. “Oh yes, didn’t he tell you that? I rang ‘Cass.’ Obviously the first thing I’m going to do is call your mum and explain that you sent that email, and the second thing I’m going to do is tell her about this Craig person and explain that you propose waltzing out with this guy I’ve never met, in a top that barely comes to your navel, and see what she has to say on that subject.” I don’t know what I had expected—perhaps a show of temper, or even for Rhiannon to start crying and begging to be let off.

But her reaction was neither of those things. Instead, she smiled, rather sweetly, in a way that was totally unnerving, and said, “Oh, I don’t think you’ll do that.” “Give me one good reason why not!”

“I’ll do better than that,” she said. “I’ll give you two. Rachel. Gerhardt.” Oh fuck.

The silence in the kitchen was absolute.

For a second, I thought my knees were about to give way, and I groped my way for a barstool and slumped down on it, feeling my breath catch in my throat.

I was cornered. I realized that now. I just didn’t know quite how tight that corner was going to get.

Because this is where it gets very, very bad for me, doesn’t it, Mr. Wrexham?

This is where the police case on me shifted from being someone in the wrong place at the wrong time, to someone with a motive.

Because she was right. I couldn’t ring Sandra and Bill.

I couldn’t do that, because Rhiannon knew the truth.