When I open them again I jump in shock.
A man is standing in the garden, watching me.
3
Dorothea
A Month Before
Dorothea had been expecting this visit.
Every morning she got up, made herself a cup of tea and then sat in her favourite wing-backed chair in her studio, which had the best views of her garden and wood. In winter, a wraithlike mist clung to the branches and obscured the tops of the trees, and, as she sat there watching in anticipation, she imagined him emerging through the woods like the apparition, the ghost, that he was. Haunting her. Taunting her. Was she scared? She didn’t like to admit to any kind of vulnerability: she was proud she’d carried on living alone in the villa, long after her friends told her she should downsize, even as her body began to decay. She made sure to keep fit and dexterous with her art and her hiking, but there was no slowing down the hands of time that were ticking too quickly for her liking.
The final sculpture was her insurance. Her secrets set in papier-mâché. Other people’s secrets too. This lastcollection had featured some of her best work. It was the sequence of her life – yet without the last sculpture it was a sentence without a full stop, a story without an ending.
But there was an ending, of course. There was always an ending if you waited long enough.
Solly started whining by her side, his ears pricked forwards, his nose pressed to the studio’s sliding doors, leaving a mark on the glass. ‘Can you sense it?’ she whispered, placing a hand on her dog’s large head. Solly answered by whining some more, high-pitched and chilling. Her eyes were trained on the area of garden where lawn met bracken, until she was certain that she too could see him materializing from between the trees, as though he’d been living in the woods all these years. ‘He’s coming for me,’ she said to Solly. ‘He’s finally coming for me.’
4
Imogen
My first thought is that it’s him. Dominic Filcher. The man I lost my job over. I shrink back in terror, knocking my hip against the wooden table. And then, as the man walks brazenly across the terrace and right up to the French doors, I realize this man is at least thirty years older. Still, I’m shaking as I remember the night I was accosted by Filcher and I stand frozen for a few seconds.
‘I can see you,’ he calls, peering through the glass pane. ‘Who are you? What are you doing in Dorothea’s house?’ He has the kind of voice that BBC newsreaders had back in the 1960s.
I creep forward, softening when I see he has a Golden Retriever and a black Labrador by his side. ‘Who are you?’ I call back. The man is stocky, with white sideburns poking from his flat cap, and he has a matching neat beard. He looks to be somewhere in his mid-seventies and is wearing a padded, waterproof jacket. How threatening can a man with a Goldie and Lab be?
‘My name is Dennis. Dennis Creasy. I was an … um … friend of Dotty’s.’ Dotty? She was only known asDorothea during that summer. ‘I like to keep an eye on the place since her … um …’ he clears his throat, ‘… since she passed.’ Something in the way his expression softens and his pale eyes water when he mentions Dorothea makes my heart go out to him. He obviously cared for her. I search around for a key to open the doors and find it on a little hook on the end of the butcher’s block.
‘Sorry,’ I say, when I finally open it, letting in a gust of wind and rain. ‘I don’t know anyone around here and …’ I shrug apologetically. ‘I’m Imogen. It’s … well. Dorothea left me the house,’ I add in a rush.
‘Oh, right. I see. That would explain why you’re here, then. I just wanted to check to make sure the house wasn’t being broken into.’
I bend down to stroke the dogs’ floppy ears which have gone silky in the rain. ‘Gorgeous boys.’ I’m obsessed with dogs. Every time I see one I have to stop to coo over it. Josh always says we can’t get one because our flat is too small.
‘This is Solly. He belonged to Dorothea. Thankfully he managed to escape the fire and I’ve taken him in …’
‘Solly was here when she died? That’s so sad.’
‘Yes. He was the one who alerted Mick next door that something was up. He wouldn’t stop barking and practically led Mick here.’
Mick. That was Harry’s dad’s name. ‘Mick and Sue still live next door?’
He nods. ‘That’s right. You know them?’
‘From a long time ago. I was friends with their son, Harry. I hadn’t seen Dorothea in years, but she was always so kind to me.’
‘She was an amazing woman. The best.’ His voice cracks and he turns it into a clearing of the throat.
‘Had you known her a long time?’
‘We’ve been friends and neighbours for the last ten years.’
‘My solicitor said there wasn’t a funeral for her.’
‘No. Just a very small cremation. No service. That’s all she wanted. No big fuss. We – me and three of her closest friends – scattered her ashes there …’ He turns and points towards Dorothea’s woods and the wind picks up, rustling the branches. From somewhere nearby I can hear windchimes. ‘That’s what she wanted,’ he says again. ‘Small, intimate. Despite being a famous artist, Dorothea never did like being the centre of attention.’ He smiles sadly.
