I turn the light off and lie in the dark, waves of fury rolling over my body. I toss and turn and must eventually fall asleep because when I wake up it’s crushingly dark, and I can hear Phoenix’s low, rumbling growl that seems to vibrate through the bed. My heart starts hammering and pressure builds in my bladder. I sit up, listening for sounds, my skin turning clammy. Phoenix’s growls grow more insistent as I blink in the darkness, trying to adjustmy eyes. I can just about see the outline of his pricked ears, his bared teeth and the whites of his eyes. I pick out the shadows in the darkness. Phoenix’s head is now turned towards my closed bedroom door. He isn’t one of those barky dogs. We rescued him eighteen months ago from our local cats-and-dogs home – he’d been well trained and adored for the first eight years of his life by an elderly lady who’d had to give him up to go into residential care.
‘What is it? What is it, baby?’ I whisper, reaching for his head, but he continues his low-level snarling. When Rufus is here I keep my bedroom door open, a habit from when he was little. I swing my legs around and sit on the edge of the bed. Phoenix jumps down and lets out a sharp bark that makes me jump. And then he stands at my bedroom door, growling. My heart picks up speed. This is unlike him. Oh God, oh God. I try to quell my panic that someone is in the house, but my legs start trembling.
‘Sssh, Phoenix, shush.’ I listen intently for any sound or movement, but I can’t hear anything apart from the dog. I go to the window and pull aside the curtains. The street is dark and silent. I can see the corner of the Morgans’ house, but there are no lights on. The clock on my bedside table flashes up 1.06 a.m. Is it burglars?
Phoenix barks again. I scan the room for an object I can use as a weapon. All I can see is my lamp. I pull the plug from the wall, the lead trailing after me as I brandish the lamp in one hand. With trepidation I open the door and grab Phoenix’s collar so he can’t dart off without me. I stand there for a moment, my heart beating wildly, and then I grapple around for the light switch. I slowly descendthe stairs, Phoenix straining against my hand. I can hear my shallow breathing, but everything else is quiet. Phoenix is still growling softly. I’ve reached the bottom step now. The lamp feels sweaty in my hand, but I grip it tighter. Moonlight or streetlight filters through the fan of glass at the top of the front door, reflecting onto the wooden floor, but everything else is in shadow.
Phoenix suddenly pulls away from me and gallops towards the kitchen, barking madly. Oh God, is someone in there?
‘Phoenix,’ I hiss, fear making me snap.
I pad down the hallway towards the kitchen and jump when I hear a crash outside, something falling and breaking. My heart thumps painfully.What the fuck was that?
From my position in the hallway I can see through to the kitchen and the patio doors ahead. They are closed. No smashed glass or kicked-in lock.
Nausea engulfs me and for a few moments I’m too scared to move. I’m suspended there, in the hallway, clutching the stupid, useless lamp. And then fear is replaced by anger. How dare someone come into my house? My sanctuary. And, with a burst of adrenaline, I rush into the kitchen, growling like a woman possessed, the lamp raised, ready to hit whoever might be lurking in the kitchen.
But it’s only Phoenix standing there, looking up at me with his dark eyes.
‘What was that crash?’ I ask Phoenix. I catch sight of myself in the reflection of the patio doors, in my shapeless PJs, my dark hair a messy halo around my head, my brown eyes huge in my pale face. And then I notice somethingelse. I move closer to the doors and peer through the glass. One of my terracotta tubs is overturned, rolling on its side on the patio. Someone was out there. Someone was in my garden. I click on the outside light, which instantly illuminates the patio, throwing shadows onto the lawn.
A chill runs down my back.
The garden gate that leads to the lane, which is always closed, is wide open.
I’m relieved when it’s morning. I hardly slept the rest of the night and took a knife to bed. I’m not sure what I would have done with it had anyone tried to break in. The cry of a baby woke me briefly at five but I dropped off again, feeling safer because the sun was up. Now, in the cold light of day, I grasp at explanations for the knocked-over tub and the open garden gate. Maybe I’d forgotten to lock it. Maybe an animal had knocked over the tub. I’m not convinced.
At seven thirty my room is like an oven, and I reach over to widen the window. The morning air smells of hot car fumes and festering bins. My head is pounding. I shouldn’t have drunk so much last night and now I’ve got a full day at Citizens Advice ahead of me.
I reach for my phone to text Jo but she’s already sent a message.
SO? Did you listen?
For a few seconds I wonder what she’s talking about and then I remember our plan. I get out of bed and head to Rufus’s room, kneeling on the carpet to press play on the tape deck. There is nothing but white noise. I pick it up and take it downstairs, plonking it on the kitchen table.I let the tape run while I’m making a cup of tea and sorting out Phoenix’s breakfast. My limbs feel heavy. Just when I’m about to give up and turn it off I hear something: Phoenix’s barking and growling. And then I freeze. What was that? A crash. The same as the crash I heard last night. My eyes instantly go to the tub, still lying on its side.
I rewind and listen, turning up the dial as far as it will go. It’s faint and hard to hear behind the fuzz of white noise and Phoenix’s barking, but I’m sure I’m not mistaken. It’s there, just after the crash of the tub.
A man’s voice.
6
HENRY
December 1986 London
Henry didn’t want to go to the party. He hated all the false joviality surrounding Christmas, but it was a new job and his boss, Stanley, had insisted he went.
‘You’ll have fun,’ he’d said, clapping him on the back, like they were old chums. ‘All the higher echelons of society will be there. Plus trustees at the hospital. You can do a bit of hobnobbing.’
Henry hadn’t become one of the top surgeons at the private hospital where he worked to ‘hobnob’. If he’d wanted a job like that he would have been a lawyer. But he’d looked up into Stanley’s shiny, plump, expectant face and acquiesced, even if he would rather have gone back to his little rented flat in Marble Arch to immerse himself in the first and special editions of his favourite books and drown his sorrows with a bottle of Chablis.
So now here he was, wearing a borrowed dinner jacket, in the back of the taxi as it darted through the ice-coatedLondon streets towards Kensington, squashed between Stanley and his garlic breath, and another colleague, Rupert something or other, who wouldn’t shut up about advances in cosmetic surgery. The radio was playing that annoying Christmas song by Shakin’ Stevens, although he could hardly hear it over Rupert sucking up to the boss.
The party was being held at the V&A Museum, and when Henry got out of the taxi he stood and gazed up at the building with its beautiful intricate mouldings and arches. The entrance was lit up against the dark night, casting a blue hue onto the frost-covered steps, and despite his reluctance to socialize, he marvelled at how far he had come in the last decade. He had escaped his dull little Hampshire town in the middle of nowhere and the father he’d always been so afraid of. Through sheer hard work and intelligence, he’d managed to gain a place at medical school at Cambridge and change his life. Now he was here he just wanted to keep his head down, earn money and his freedom, and exist under the radar.
‘Come on, slowcoach,’ called Stanley, and Henry steeled himself, as he’d taught himself to do in childhood, to follow them inside.
It was a posh do and the jacket was too tight, the fabric pulling across his back and around his armpits. A string quartet was playing Christmas songs, and uniformed waiting staff were weaving in and out of the crowds carrying silver trays covered with fancy foods he’d never heard of. Someone thrust a glass of champagne into his hand as soon as he entered the room, and Stanley, a handfirmly on his shoulder, directed him to different ‘influential’ people, but it wasn’t long before he found himself adrift, as he always did. He stood in the corner and watched all these people effortlessly work the room. It crossed his mind that he’d never felt more alone. He couldn’t do this, he thought. He was a strange, messed-up jumble of nerves and demons and trauma. He wasn’t a proper functioning person. It was something that ate away at him when he was alone, burrowing into his mind, like a flesh-eating parasite. At school the other boys had thought he was weird. At home his father hated him. At medical school he kept himself to himself. He studied hard, worked his way up the ranks, but he never socialized. One of his deep-seated fears was that he’d never had the chance to form a personality. That, despite being handsome, he was too buttoned-up. Too strange.
