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I should have just left.

I should have picked up the baby monitor, walked to the door, and let myself out.

But before I returned to the house, I could not resist one final look back at Jack, lying there, his skin golden in the firelight, his eyes closed, his lips parted in a way that made me want to kiss him one last time.

And as I glanced back, I saw something else.

It was a purple flower, lying on the countertop. For a minute I couldn’t work out why it looked familiar, nor why my gaze had snagged on it. And then I realized—it was the same as the flower I had found the other morning in the kitchen and put into the coffee cup to revive. Had Jack left the flower on the kitchen floor? But no—he had been away that night, running errands for Bill . . . hadn’t he? Or was that a different night? Lack of sleep was making the days blur, run into each other, and it was becoming hard to remember which of the long, nightmarish stretches of darkness belonged to which morning.

As I stood there, frowning, trying to remember, I noticed something else. Something even more mundane. But something that made me stop in my tracks, my stomach lurching with unease. It was a little coil of string. Totally innocuous—so why had it unnerved me so?

I walked back across the room and picked it up.

It was a hank of white caterers’ string, doubled and tripled up, and tied with a granny knot that was suddenly horribly familiar. And it had been cleanly severed—snipped in half by a very sharp knife, or perhaps the very pair of pruning shears I had rescued from the poison garden.

Whichever it was, it didn’t really matter now.

What mattered was that it was the hank of string I had wound around the poison garden gate, too high for little hands to reach—the string I had put there to keep the girls safe. But what was it doing in Jack’s kitchen? And why was it lying next to that innocent-looking flower?

As I pulled out my phone and opened up Google, there was a sick fluttering feeling in my chest, as if I already knew what I was going to find. Purple flower poisonous I typed into the search bar, and then clicked on Google Images, and there it was, the second image, its strange drooping shape and bright purple color totally unmistakable. Aconitum napellus (monkshood), I read, the feeling of sickness growing inside me with every line. One of the most toxic flowers native to the UK. Aconitine is a potent heart and nerve toxin, and any part of the plant, including stems, leaves, petals, or roots, can be deadly. Most deaths result from ingesting A. napellus, but gardeners are advised to use extreme caution in handling cuttings, as even skin contact can cause symptoms.

Underneath it was a list of deaths and murders associated with the plant.

I shut down the phone, and turned to look at Jack, unable to believe it. Had it really been him, all along?

Him in the locked garden, pruning the poisonous plants, keeping that horrible place alive.

Him undoing the safety measures I had set up to try to protect the children.

Him, carefully selecting the most poisonous blossom he could find and leaving it lying in the middle of the kitchen floor. All I had done was handle it—but it could so easily have been found by the children, or even one of the dogs.

And I had just fucked him.

But why? Why would he do it? And what else was he responsible for?

Had he been the person who hacked into the system to jolt us all out of our beds in the middle of the night with deafening music and terrified screams?

Was he the one who had been setting off the doorbell, jerking me from sleep, and keeping me awake with the terrifying creak, creak of stealthy footsteps?

And worst of all, had he been the one who wrote those horrible things in the locked attic room, and then boarded up after himself, only to “rediscover” it when the time was right?

I found that my breath was coming quick and short, my hands shaking as I shoved the phone back into my pocket, and suddenly I had to get out, get away from him at all costs.

Not troubling now to be silent, I flung open the door to the flat, and stepped out into the night, slamming it behind me. It had started to rain again, and I ran, feeling the rain on my cheeks, the tightness in my throat, and the blurring of my eyes.

The utility room door was still unlocked, and I let myself in, leaning back against the door and using my T-shirt to wipe my eyes, trying to get a hold of myself.

Fuck. Fuck. What was it about me and the men in my life? Why were they such shits, all of them?

As I stood there, trying to calm my gulping breath, I remembered the faint sound I’d heard before, as I was dressing. The house was just as I’d left it: no sign of Rhiannon’s high heels kicked off in the hallway, or handbag abandoned on the bottom step of the stairs. But I hadn’t really expected that. I would have heard a car pulling up. It had probably been one of the dogs.

I wiped my eyes again, peeled off my shoes, and walked slowly through to the kitchen, feeling the faint warmth of the underfloor heating striking up through the concrete. Hero and Claude were curled sleepily in their baskets, snoring quietly. They looked up as I came in, and then laid their heads wearily back down as I sat at the breakfast bar, put my head in my hands, and tried to decide what to do.

I could not go to bed. No matter what Jack had said, Rhiannon was still missing, and I couldn’t just forget that fact. What I should do—what I needed to do, in fact—was write an email to Sandra. A proper one, explaining everything that had happened.

But there was something else I had to do first.

For the more I thought about it, the more Jack’s behavior did not add up. It wasn’t just the poison garden—it was everything. The way he was always hanging around when things went wrong. The fact that he seemed to have keys to every room in the house and access to parts of the home-management system that he shouldn’t. How had he known how to override the app that night when the music came screaming out of the speakers? How had he just happened to have a key to the locked attic door?

And whatever he said, he was, after all, a Grant. What if there was some connection I was missing? Could he be some long-lost relative of Dr. Kenwick Grant, come back to drive the Elincourts out from his ancestral home?

But no—that last what-if was too much. This wasn’t some nineteenth-century peasant’s revenge drama. What would Jack gain from driving the Elincourts out of their own home? Nothing. All he’d get would be another English couple in their place. And besides, it wasn’t the Elincourts who seemed to be targeted. It was me.

Because the fact was that four nannies—five if you counted Holly—had left the Elincourts. No, not left; they had been systematically driven away, one by one. And I might have believed that Bill’s roving hands were responsible, if it hadn’t been for my own experiences in Heatherbrae House. Someone in this house, someone or something, was driving the nannies away, in a deliberate and sustained campaign of persecution.

I just didn’t know who.

Somewhere behind my eyes, a dull throbbing ache had begun, echoing the pain in my hand—the light-headedness from the wine I’d drunk earlier was already morphing into the beginnings of a shocking hangover. But I couldn’t give way to that now. Slowly, unsteadily, I slid from the breakfast barstool, walked over to the sink, and splashed my face, trying to wake myself up, clear my head for what I was about to do.

But as I stood, water dripping from my loose hair, hands braced either side of the sink, I saw something. Something that had not been there when I left, I was sure of it—or at least, as sure as I could be, for now nothing seemed certain anymore.

To the right of the sink was my almost-empty wine bottle. Only now it was totally empty. What should have had a glass left in it was now completely drained. And in the groove around the edge of the waste-disposal unit was a single crushed berry.

It could have been the remnants of a blueberry or a raspberry, mashed out of all recognition, but somehow, I knew it was not.

My heart was thumping as I reached, very slowly, into the waste-disposal unit.

Deep, deep into the metal mouth I reached, until my fingers touched something at the bottom. Something soft and hard by turns, into which my fingers sank as I clawed up the mass.

It was a mush of berries. Yew. Holly. Cherry laurel.

And in spite of the water I’d sluiced down the drain, I could smell, quite clearly, the dregs of wine still clinging to them.

It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense. Those berries had not been in the wine when I left—how could they have been? I had opened the bottle myself.

Which meant someone had put them in there when I was not looking. Someone who had been in this kitchen tonight, after the children were in bed.

But then . . . but then someone else had tipped them out.

It was like there were two forces in the house, one fighting to drive me away, another to protect me. But who—who was doing this?

I didn’t know. But if there were answers to be found, I knew where I had to look.

My chest was tight as I straightened up, and I groped in my jeans pocket for my inhaler and took a puff, but the tension didn’t loosen, and I found my breath was coming quick and shallow as I made my way to the stairs, and began to climb into the darkness.

As I got closer and closer to the top landing, I couldn’t help remembering the last time I had stood there, hand on the rounded knob, simply unable to go any further—unable to face whatever watchful darkness lay behind that door.

Now, though, I was beginning to suspect that whatever haunted Heatherbrae was very human. And I was determined that this time, I would turn the knob, open the door, and find evidence to that effect—evidence that I could show Sandra when I told her about tonight’s events.

But when I got to the landing, I found I didn’t need to open it at all. For my door . . . the door to my room, was open. And I had left it closed.

I had a clear, a crystal clear memory of standing in front of it, looking at the crack beneath it, totally unable to turn the handle.

And now it stood open.

It was very cold again, even colder than it had been that time I woke in the night, shivering, to find the thermostat turned down and the air conditioning blasting out. But this time I could feel it was more than just the chill of the room; it was an actual breeze.

For a moment I felt every part of that firm resolution shrivel down like plastic in a flame, disappearing into the core of me, melting and curling into a hard blackened core.

Where was the breeze coming from? Was it the attic door? If it was open again—in spite of the lock and the key in my pocket, and in spite of Jack lying asleep in his flat across the courtyard—I thought I would scream.

Then I got a hold of myself.

This was insane. There was no such thing as ghosts. No such thing as haunting. There was nothing in that attic but dust and the relics of bored children, fifty years dead.

I walked into the room and pressed the button on the panel.

Nothing happened. I tried a different square, one I was sure had made the lamps come on last night. Still nothing, though an unseen fan began to hum. For a long moment I stood in the dark, trying to figure out what to do. I could smell the cold dusty air that blew through the attic keyhole, and I could hear something too—not the creak, creak of before, but a low, mechanical buzzing that puzzled me.

And then, out of nowhere, a sudden wave of anger washed over me.

Whatever it was, whatever was up there, I would not let myself be scared like this. Someone, something, was trying to drive me away from Heatherbrae, and I was not giving in to it.

I don’t know if it was the remnants of the wine in my veins that gave me courage, or the knowledge that when I rang Sandra the next day, very likely I would be going home anyway, but I took my phone out of my pocket, switched on the torch, and strode across the bedroom to the attic door.

As I did so, the buzzing sounded again. It was coming from above my head. The sound was familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. It sounded like a furiously angry wasp, but there was something . . . something robotic about it, a quality that did not make me think it was a living thing.

I felt in my jeans pocket for the key, which was still there from yesterday, hard and unyielding against my leg, and I drew it out.

Softly, very softly, I put the key into the closet door, and turned it. It was stiff—but not as stiff as last time. The WD-40 had done its work, and although I felt resistance, it turned quietly, without the screech of metal on metal it had given when Jack forced the lock.

Then I set my hand to the door, and opened it.

The smell was just as I remembered from last time—dank, musty, the smell of death and abandonment.

But there was something up there, I could see that now, something casting a low white glow that illuminated the cobwebs the spiders had woven across the attic steps. Yet, no one had been up there since Jack and me, that was plain. It was not just the key in my pocket that told me that—but the thick unbroken webs across my path, painstakingly respun since my last passage. There was no way someone could have passed this way without disturbing them. As it was, I was forced to step cautiously, sweeping my hand in front of my face to try to keep the clinging strands out of my eyes and mouth.

What was the light? The moon, shining through that tiny window? Perhaps, though it was so covered with grot, I would have been surprised.

At the top of the stairs I drew a silent breath, steeling myself, and then I stepped into the attic.

I saw two things straightaway.

The first was that the attic was just as I had last seen it when I took a final glance back at the place before following Jack down the steps the day before. The only thing that was missing was the doll’s head that had rolled out from the pile to rest in the center of the room. That was gone.

The second was that the moon was shining into the attic, and surprisingly brightly, for the window—the window that Jack had shut—was open again. He had evidently not latched it properly and it had blown open in the night. Striding angrily across the creaking boards, I slammed it, harder than he had, and fumbled in the darkness for a catch. At length I found one—a long tongue drilled with holes. It was covered in thick cobwebs, and I was forced to brush them aside with my hands, feeling the crunch of long-dead prey in the webs, as I wiggled it back into place, ensuring that there was no way the window could work itself open again.

At last it was secure, and I stepped back into the room, wiping my hands. The light had dimmed instantly as I shut the window, the mildewed glass shutting out everything but a thin trickle. But as I turned back to the stairs, the thin beam from my torch illuminating a narrow path across the floor boards, I noticed something else. There was another light. A fainter, bluer one this time, and it was coming from a corner of the attic opposite the window, a corner totally in shadow, a corner where no light had a right to be.

My heart was thudding as I crossed the floor. Was it an opening to one of the rooms downstairs? Something else? Whatever the source of the light was, it was hidden behind a trunk, and I pulled it roughly aside, no longer trying to be quiet, for I no longer cared who found me up here, I had only one instinct—to find out what was really going on.

What I saw made me draw back, astonished, and kneel down in the dust to look closer.

Hidden behind the old trunk was a small pile of belongings. A book. Some chocolate bar wrappers. A bracelet. A necklace. A handful of twigs and berries, wilting, yes, but by no means desiccated.

And a mobile phone.

It was the light from the phone that I had seen from across the attic, and as I picked it up, it buzzed again, and I realized that was the source of the odd noise I had heard earlier. It had evidently updated, and was stuck in a loop of trying to turn itself back on, failing, and restarting, buzzing each time.

It was an old model, similar to one I’d had myself a few years ago, and I tried a trick that had sometimes worked when my own phone was dying, holding the volume-up and power buttons simultaneously for a long press. It hung for a moment, the screen whirling, and then went black, and I pressed restart.

But as I waited for it to reload, something caught my eye. A silvery glint, coming from the little pile of rubbish I had pushed aside to pick up the phone.

And there it was, strewn innocently across the floorboards among the rest of that pathetic pile of detritus, the light from my phone torch glinting from one of its curves.

My necklace.

My heart was beating fast in my throat as I picked it up, unable to believe it. My necklace. My necklace. What was it doing here, in the darkness?