I was in the car with Mum and Corinne, of course. I was hardly going to miss the big showdown. At the same time, though, I was still at the hotel with Dad, Ree, Tobes, and Champ. In Level 2, we call it “dispersing.” You can get exhausted quite quickly if you disperse too often, and I’m rarely tempted—there is almost always one place I’d much rather be at any given time—but tonight was an exception and I was determined to be with all my family simultaneously.
Nothing dramatic happened at the hotel. There was no sudden influx of uniformed authoritarians bearing handcuffs. Dad fell asleep about five minutes after Mum and Corinne set off for Swaffham Tilney, having first fumed and declared himself frantic with worry for around seventy-five seconds. He and Champ then snored in harmony for the rest of the night, while Ree and Toby stayed up watching horror films, declaring each one to be not as horrific as the thing we’d worked out, or thought we’d worked out, about the Gaveys.
It was 2:15 a.m. when Mum arrived at the Gaveys’ house in Bussow Court: the Stables. Nothing happened in response to her first ring of the doorbell, so she pressed it again. This time she heard a window opening above her head. A cold yellow light came on, slicing into the darkness. “Who’s there?” a man’s voice asked, sounding thin and ghostly.
“Hello, Alastair. It’s Sally Lambert. I’m here to talk to Lesley.” Mum listened to the whispering, hissing, and rustling that followedand thought it was interesting that no “How dare you?” or “Do you know what time it is?” was lobbed down at her from the open window. It sounded as if the Gaveys were silently panicking instead—guiltily scrabbling, having been caught red-handed sleeping in their own beds in the middle of the night.
More lights went on inside the Stables. Eventually, a full seven minutes later, the front door opened. Lesley and Alastair Gavey were both standing there with enormous white toweling robes of the crest-on-chest sort wrapped around them. Alastair had brown loafer-style slippers on and Mum could see the bottoms of maroon pajamas; Lesley’s feet were bare, toenails painted white. A line of navy-blue text ran along the edge of her right foot: a tattoo. Mum couldn’t read it at first and was preparing to ask what it said, in case it was something she needed to know about like “Champ Lambert must die.” Then she adjusted her position and saw it had nothing to do with Champ: “Do it for you, not for them,” whatever the hell that meant.
One after the other, Lesley and Alastair tightened the belts of their robes. Neither of them spoke.
Mum couldn’t wait to get started but also wanted to force them to make the first move, so she waited.
Finally Lesley said, “What do you want?”
“Just to talk. Can I come in?”
“No.”
“Okay. I’ll say what I’ve got to say out here, then.” Mum raised her voice. “I’m sure lots of the neighbors are crouching down beneath their bedroom windowsills, listening. It’s a warm night too—lots of windows open at the Byre and the Granary, to name but two. I’ve got nothing to hide though, so it’s fine by me.”
“All right, come in,” said Lesley quickly.
“No, don’t let her in!” Alastair sounded alarmed. He moved to block the doorway.
“Just go to bed!” Lesley shrieked at him suddenly. “Let me deal with something my way for once in your fucking life!”
It was a proper, decibelicious scream. (Yes, I invented the worddecibelicious. Just now, in fact.) Mum was sure Corinne must have heard it all the way over at Ismys House, especially if she was outside pulling the weeds off her front wall, which had been her plan. “I feel as if our lives in the village are about to change beyond all recognition,” she’d told Mum. “I’m pretty sure I want to enter this new phase with a weed-free wall.”
No more lights came on in any of the nearby houses, though Mum was sure Lesley’s scream had woken everyone in Bussow Court. Tess Gavey had to be awake too, though she didn’t reveal herself—and since Alastair had vanished like the memory of a hologram the moment his wife raised her voice, it was just Mum and Lesley left standing on either side of the open door of the Stables.
“You coming in, then, or what?” Lesley said ungraciously.
Taking her first step across the threshold into enemy territory made Mum feel unbalanced and jumpy, but she reassured herself of the okayness of everything by visualizing Champ, safely far away; by now he would be lying on his back on the hotel bed, head half-hidden in the groove between Dad’s pillows and Mum’s, with his front paws in the air and his wet black nose poking out at a funny angle.
Once she was inside and the front door was closed, Mum waited for the offer of a cup of tea or a glass of water, but no refreshmentswere even alluded to. That was a shame; Mum would have enjoyed specifying which sorts of drink receptacles she found intolerable, as Lesley had when she’d viewed Shukes.
A row of abstract paintings in heavy-looking black metal frames dominated the wall opposite the stairs; crude, bright splurges—blue, green, violet, orange—as if made from the dripped blood of several different alien species who wouldn’t have gotten on well if they’d met. The wall on the stairs side was plain, a pale lilac color, whereas the paintings wall was papered: pink and green checks, a sort of futuristic, metallic tartan. Someone had created this effect by choice, and my only thought on seeing it for the first time (I’d been in Tess’s bedroom before but not the hall) was that perhaps every family got the entrance hall it deserved.
Lesley Gavey stood in front of her wide, wooden staircase, arms folded. The message was clear: downstairs only, no access granted to the upper level. Mum was fine with that; she had no desire to see any Gavey toothbrushes. “Champ didn’t bite Tess, and you know that as well as I do,” she told Lesley. “I’m not here to argue with you, so don’t bother saying anything. We both know the truth. No dog bit Tess—no dog at all. She was bitten by a human, and that human was you.”
The expression on Lesley Gavey’s face was all the confirmation Mum needed: instant terror. She made a noise that sounded like the haunted engine of a very old car struggling to change gear, and she didn’t bother to deny it. And I have to say, Mum pulled off the tone with aplomb. It was everything it needed to be, exactly what she and Corinne had tested and honed for hours in the car en route from Many Frogs to Swaffham Tilney.A bored-cum-weary-cum-bureaucratic note was the right one to strike, they’d agreed—the voice you’d use to tell someone that, unfortunately, since they hadn’t filled in the form in blue ink before 23 February, as stated in the small print…blah, blah, blah.
Next came the part Mum wished could be different. She’d have preferred to tell the truth and explain to Lesley how she’d worked out that there couldn’t have been a guilty, bitey dog because if such an animal existed, the Gaveys, vindictive as they are, would have gone after him or her instead of Champ. To say all that would have given Lesley a way out, since it was only a theory. The smart move, Corinne had insisted, was to pretend to have concrete knowledge. Proof.
“Maybe if you’d spent less time screaming at Tess about how useless and ungrateful she is, she wouldn’t have dobbed you in, but…” Mum shrugged. “Too late for that, eh? How do you think I know you’re the biter? Tess didn’t telltoomany people the truth, but…” Mum broke off with a shrug. “How often have we all done it? You tell just one person, thinking, ‘This doesn’t really count as telling anyone. One person is almost no one. It’s as good as telling nobody at all.’ Wrong. Big mistake.”
Mum shook her head slowly, in apparent regret. “Now, since Tess doesn’t have any friends because her personality is so repulsive, I guess she wasn’t exactly spoiled for choice when it came to confidants.”
Lesley sat down on her staircase’s lowest step. Her lower lip had started to tremble.
“Here’s the plan,” Mum said calmly. “At the moment, only a handful of people know the truth, but the story’s going to breakon social media very soon—tomorrow, the next day latest, I’d guess. And trust me, Lesley, what you need to do is get ahead of it. Seriously. This is the same advice I’d give my best friend: Break the story yourself, with profuse apologies from you and Tess and your whole family. Ring the police, get Tess to announce it on Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok. Say you lied because of some very distressing personal circumstance your family’s been dealing with, something everyone will agree deserves heaps of sympathy… So, like, I recommendnotchoosing anything along the lines of having to get out of a luxury swimming pool a few minutes earlier than you’d ideally have liked to, because no one’s going to sympathize with that. Oh, and cite mental health issues! Make up some kind of borderline-bipolarishness, and pretend you can’t remember anything you did during that bleak period.”
By now Mum was getting into her stride and quite enjoying herself. “I don’t actually care what else you say apart from that Champ definitely didn’t bite Tess,” she told Lesley. “That’s all that matters to me. You have to take back the lie that you invented in order to try and get my dog killed. If that’s okay?” she added bitterly. “And, you know, the great thing about a mental-health-based lie is that it’s kind of true at the same time. I mean, no one of sound mind would go round behaving the way you do. It’s not rational or healthy to weep outside other people’s houses for hours, or to bite your daughter’s arm and try to pin it on an innocent Welsh terrier. So you are, in fact, a proper nutter, even if you haven’t gotten an official diagnosis.”
Lesley had started to cry. “I’m so sorry, Sally. I just… I can’t describe how sorry I am. It’s a terrible thing we’ve done to you andyour family. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. How could I do it?” she gasped, eyes wide. “How could I bite my own daughter? I… It felt like such a good idea when I first… But I never meant to bite her so hard. All we needed was a few little tooth marks to be able to say it was Champ. I don’t know what went wrong, but…somehow I ended up really wounding her. I scarred my baby for life. It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal. I mean, I’d bitten her before and nothing like that had happened.”
“You’d…” Mum cleared her throat. “You’d bitten her before?”
