CHAPTER ONE
‘Game, set, match to—’
Aleksey Rider-Mikkelsen shoved past Ben with an annoyed scowl. Ben broke off his announcement, looking contrite, but Aleksey saw through this pretense to the gleeful amusement beneath. He wrenched open the gate and began to pace back across the lawn towards the woods. He heard furtive shuffling behind him as Emilia and Ben jogged to catch up and follow just close enough so their whispered conversation, concerned and worried as they made it sound, was nevertheless quite audible.
‘He won… What’s wrong with him, Ben?’
‘He’s regretting letting me umpire. He thinks I was cheating in your favour.’
‘But he slaughtered me! Six-love, six-love.’
‘Yeah, but you got a point off him in that last game. It’s a humiliating defeat for him really, when you think about it.’ Ben’s voice dropped even lower but was still evidently pitched for his ears to catch. ‘I think he even had to run then.’
‘I guess. I did see some sweat.’
‘That was probably just panic breaking out.’
She’d been practicing. It was the only explanation Aleksey could come up with. He’d thought it suspicious that she’d only arrived home for the Christmas holidays late the previous evening but had immediately proposed a tennis match this morning. As Ben had so helpfully pointed out, he’d actually had to wake up at one point during that last game and run to the baseline, and then…and then…Emilia’s lob had dropped immaculately onto the line, and he’d not been able to return it. He mulled this over for a while as they entered the path to the woodland, and then he stopped abruptly as a memory popped into his mind: a bright green VW, a folded bicycle, anda tennis racket. Professor fucking Aren’t-I-Gorgeous Mark Trebetherick. Ben, who’d apparently been walking backwards (probably so he could make dumb faces at Emilia at his expense), bumped into him and swore. He elbowed Ben off and turned to accuse the smirking redhead. ‘You’ve been playing, practicing—at college.’
Emilia did a few swings of her racket at an imaginary ball. Radulf had the real one in his jaws. He was probably taking it back to turn into a trophy, the perfidious, disloyal hound.
‘Yeah, someone offered to give me some lessons.’
He was right. Clearly, the good professor had not taken his words of warning as much to heart as he ought.
Emilia narrowed her eyes. ‘Don’t look like that. You don’t impress me, Mr Scar and Scowl.’
‘That’s whateveryoneis saying today.’ They all turned to the small figure skipping up the path behind them from the direction of the chapel, even smaller ginger figure perched on her shoulder. Ben crouched down and Molly ran to him to be swung up. The kitten abandoned ship and leapt instead to Emilia’s shoulder, where it burrowed under the girl’s flaming red hair, and then peeped out, seemingly quite at home draped in the fiery strands. Aleksey eyed it sourly and wondered if that was indeed the case.
From the additional height of Ben’s shoulders, Molly asked, ‘What does Mr Scarandscowl look like? Is he like Mr Silly? Mr Silly hasn’t got any eyes.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Aleksey was still annoyed with one daughter and really didn’t need a confusing conversation with the other.
‘A man said it to me. He was watching me putting flowers on the graves.’ They all stilled. Even Radulf dropped his slobbery treasure.
Ben lifted her from his shoulders and held her up so he could see her face. Surprisingly calmly, he asked, ‘What man, Mol Mol? What are you talking about?’ Ben then cast a quick, anxious frown towards him, which Aleksey realised probably meant more along the lines of, ‘For fuck’s sake, Molly, don’t get him started,’ rather than, ‘This doesn’t sound good,’ which is the response he thought Molly’s pronouncement should elicit.
He plucked the little girl from Ben’s hands. ‘What man? Where was he? What did he say to you?’
Her mouth opened, but the processing function ground to a halt. He sighed and simplified, ‘Just tell me what happened.’
‘There was a man.’
He could have sworn he saw Radulf’s head tip to one side in expectation of more at the exact same moment his did. He clenched his jaw. ‘And…?’
Molly laughed. ‘He was a Jack-in-the-box. I said, “You’re a Jack-in-the-box.”.’
This clearly defeated the others as well, if their expressions were anything to go by. Ben seemed to think intervention was needed, for he took his daughter back and, smoothing her wayward hair from her forehead, asked gently, ‘Why did you think that, sweetheart? Did he have a box…?’
Aleksey really didn’t need Ben asking that and was immediately unable to stop himself from imagining a dark figure holding a coffin-shaped box in his hands. A small, Molly-sized, coffin-shaped box, come to that. Molly, however, only rolled her eyes, and Aleksey heard it before she said it and couldn’t help a rueful lip quirk at Ben’s annoyance, despite the looming presence of this box-carrying, child-snatching serial killer. ‘No! You’re just being silly, Daddy.’ Before Ben could reframe his question, she added, demonstrating with a bob down and jerk up, ‘He popped up. From behind the wall. Pop.’
Aleksey lifted her back once more, and she giggled, clearly finding this new game amusing. ‘What did he say when he saw you?’
‘He said he was invisible.’
Aleksey raised his eyebrows and glanced to Ben, his earlier irritation with the annoying one now put to one side. ‘Invisible?’
Molly nodded seriously.
