And indeed, when Rachel got back to the house at five o’clock that evening, the housekeeper and her husband were sitting in the kitchen with their coats on, ready to depart, waiting only for her return. She embraced them both, gave Faustina a kiss pregnant with feeling, then walked with them out through the debris and saw them safely through the hoarding. They trudged off together in the direction of the nearest Piccadilly Line station, holding hands, the weight of their shared suitcase pulling Jules’s body off balance to the left. Rachel went back inside and realized that the house was quieter, vaster and lonelier than ever.
She called Madiana to tell her what had happened. It was lunchtime in New York by now and she seemed to be eating in a noisy restaurant. At the back of Rachel’s mind had been the hope (the absurd hope, she quickly realized) that Madiana herself would come home to look after her children for the next couple of weeks. But she had no intention of doing that. She told Rachel that she trusted her and knew that she could rely on her and she called her an angel and many other borderline-affectionate terms. She told her to make use of both halves of the house for the time being and to treat the place as her own.
*
Rachel keyed in the code to the magic door on the second-floor landing and passed through the mirror into the haunted, enchanted kingdom that was the Gunns’ living space, a space that was probably big enough to house twenty people but for the moment was home only to two unattended nine-year-old girls.
It was not quite silent on this side of the mirror. The noise of the television was coming from the girls’ playroom.
Rachel found them watching a rerun of Friends together on a satellite comedy channel. One of the female characters was explaining to one of the male characters where all the female erogenous zones were and what was the best way to bring a woman to orgasm. Grace and Sophia were watching with grave, impassive expressions; but then they never did laugh much.
‘I’m sorry I’m late for your lessons today,’ she said. ‘I’ve been to see a friend of mine in the country. Also, as you probably know, Faustina and Jules have had some bad news and they’ve had to go home very suddenly. They’ll probably be gone for about a fortnight.’
Again, it was hard to tell whether this information really affected them in any way. Nothing seemed to get through to them, somehow: even the news that the family dog had been fatally wounded had not seemed to upset them, particularly. The more time she spent with these strange, emotionless girls, the more Rachel felt that she was dealing with two of John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos.
‘I think we’ll forget about work for the moment, anyway, I’ll go down and find something we can have for dinner,’ she said.
Grace nodded and Sophia stuck up her thumb in approval. Rachel withdrew and went downstairs to the main kitchen, thinking to herself that even these little gestures represented a small victory.
*
Although the twins were cooperative and uncomplaining and didn’t argue much either with Rachel or each other, the process of feeding them and making sure they bathed themselves and then reading to them in bed was still surprisingly tiring. Rachel had decided to carry on sleeping in her own bedroom but she made a point of wedging open the doors that connected the two parts of the house, and told the girls that they should come and find her, or call her on the internal phone system, if they got scared or if anything was wrong. It was almost ten o’clock by the time they were both tucked up in bed and sleeping. After that, Rachel found herself unable to settle. She kept climbing up and down the narrow staircase at the back of the house and checking that the doors and windows were locked. Faustina’s sudden departure had really shaken her. That, and the terrible fate of Mortimer. That was two days ago, now. She wondered what Jules had done with the body. She went to her bedroom window, opened it and peered out into the garden. Surely he would not just have left it there? That would be too grisly to contemplate.
No, the canine bundle had definitely gone. A light breeze was beginning to stir and an untethered section of tarpaulin was flapping quite loudly. She hoped that it wouldn’t keep her awake all night. It was a corner of the tarpaulin that covered the pit, or was meant to. It seemed to have come loose.
Then there came another sound from the garden. A loud, metallic clang, as if a bucket had just been knocked over. Was there something out there? In the absence of any other explanation, Rachel had still not discounted her own theory that it was some fearless, oversized urban fox that had entered the garden and attacked Mortimer. She craned her neck further out of the window and squinted towards the rear, ivy-covered wall. It was too dark to see anything for certain but, the more intently she looked, the more she suspected that there was something there, some wild creature, lurking in the deepest shadows.
And then she did see it. It rushed out from the back of the garden, scuttled towards the edge of the pit and disappeared through the hole in the tarpaulin. Its body was black and grossly distended, its movement was unmistakably insectile, and she was convinced that she could even make out the hairs on the last of its eight legs as it dived down into the pit, scrambling down the walls, plunging deeper and deeper into the darkness from which it had come.
15
‘The thing is,’ Rachel said, ‘when I’m sitting here with you, talking like this, everything seems so normal.’
‘Of course it does. Everything is normal.’
‘I know. I imagined it. I’d had a really stressful day, I was incredibly tired … Maybe I even nodded off and dreamed it.’
‘Quite possibly that is the explanation. After all, you’d just seen the picture in the museum, and you’d been looking again at the card from the old pack of cards that your friend gave you all those years ago. So this creature, or something like it, was very much on your mind.’
Rachel and Livia were having coffee together once again at the Lido café in Hyde Park. They had not wanted to give up on the burgeoning friendship just because Mortimer no longer furnished them with a pretext. In fact, more than ever, Rachel valued Livia’s sanity, her smiling good nature, the sense of calm she always radiated with her measured advice and tuneful, cello-like voice.
‘So you don’t think I’m going mad?’ Rachel asked, with a smile that didn’t do much to conceal the sincerity of the question.
‘Of course not. This is such a difficult time for you. You just need to take things easy.’
‘Everything seems to be going wrong at once,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s just one thing after another. My gran phoned this morning. She’d had a letter from Grandad’s oncologist.’
‘Yes? What was the news?’
‘Nothing good. He’d applied to the Cancer Drugs Fund for that drug you mentioned but they turned him down. Too expensive, apparently. Oddly enough, that doesn’t seem to have been a problem for your client — the Duchess or the Baroness or whatever she is.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Livia, ‘I never thought about the expense. Of course, she’s a very wealthy woman and might have paid for it herself. The thing is, I don’t always understand how things work in your country. I’m trying to find out more about it. I thought this book might help me.’
She handed Rachel the book she was currently reading, a thick, faded green hardback with no dustjacket. It was called The Winshaw Legacy, by Michael Owen.
‘I found this in the charity shop,’ she said. ‘The Winshaws are a famous family in Britain, I think. This tells their story. Did you read it?’