Rachel shook her head. ‘Maybe I should. Their name seems to come up everywhere these days. My friend Alison was stitched up by one of them. She was telling me about it just the other day.’
‘Really? By a member of this family? Which one?’
‘Josephine.’
Livia’s eyes narrowed. She had very striking, amber eyes.
‘Oh yes. I know Josephine.’
‘You do?’
‘She lives near here. Not far from the house where you live, in fact. I walk her dog sometimes. But nobody has seen her for a few days.’
‘Taking a well-earned break in Mauritius or somewhere, no doubt.’
‘I don’t think so. The police are looking for her.’ She pressed her copy of the book into Rachel’s hands. ‘Here — borrow it. Please.’
‘Thanks, but I’m not really in the mood for reading at the moment.’
‘No. Take it. You should learn about these people.’
Purely because Livia was being so insistent, Rachel flicked through the pages quickly, automatically, and then put it in her knapsack. ‘OK, I’ll give it a try,’ she said. ‘Thank you. And thanks for trying to help with my grandad. I hate to think of him suffering the way he is.’ She clasped Livia’s hand. ‘You’re a good friend. There aren’t many people like you in my life at the moment.’
‘And how are things with your boyfriend?’
‘Oh, OK. He’s trying to get a chapter of his thesis finished. He doesn’t seem to have much time to think about anything else right now.’
‘Well, I’m here for you,’ said Livia. ‘And the children, if you want me to take them off your hands for a while.’
Rachel looked directly into her eyes, now, and felt ashamed with herself that instead of seeing — as she should have done — uncomplicated kindness there, she imagined something else instead, something ambiguous, something blank and unreadable. It was symptomatic of the way she was growing needlessly wary of other people. This job was making her cynical and mistrustful. She looked away and sipped her coffee, embarrassed.
*
That afternoon, she picked up Grace and Sophia from school at three thirty as always, and then, as they entered the building site at the front of the house, they found that all the Romanian workers were gathered around the site office, and some sort of crisis meeting was in progress. At the centre of it was Dumitru, the site manager, who seemed to be presenting Tony Blake with an ultimatum. The faces of the other workers were attentive and morose.
‘Come on, you two,’ said Rachel, hurrying the twins up the front steps. ‘This doesn’t have anything to do with us.’
Nonetheless, as soon as she had ushered them through the front door and told them to go upstairs and change out of their uniforms, she went back on to the steps to listen to the argument. But the meeting was already breaking up. Dumitru was still shouting and gesturing angrily as he stripped off his high-visibility jacket, removed his hard hat, and stormed out through the door in the hoarding. The calls from his workmates suggested, to Rachel, that they were asking him to come back, but his decision seemed clear: he was quitting. Tony Blake was staring after him, tight-lipped, and brandishing an empty, clear glass bottle in his hand.
‘Has he resigned, or something?’ she asked a pair of workers who were standing nearby.
‘Yep. He’s gone,’ said the first of them.
‘What was the argument about?’
‘He was drunk.’
‘Well, that’s what Tony says,’ his companion chipped in.
‘You saw the bottle. This morning it was full of vodka.’
‘Do you blame him? Imagine having to do what he’s been doing. Who would lead a crew on a job like this? It’s insane. It’s dangerous. This isn’t a building job, it’s a mining job. Why wouldn’t you start drinking?’
‘Fine, but if it means you start seeing things …’
‘Seeing things?’ repeated Rachel. ‘What sort of things?’
‘Dumitru told Tony that he wouldn’t go down into the pit again. He said he saw something bad, right down at the bottom.’ The man’s companion shook his head in warning, telling him to be quiet, but he continued anyway: ‘Apparently when you get down there, past all the other floors, down to Number 11, there’s a tunnel. They discovered it yesterday. No one had noticed it before. Dumitru went into it and crawled along for a while and saw —’
‘He didn’t see anything. The guy’s a drunkard. Always has been.’
‘What did he see?’ Rachel asked.
‘He doesn’t know what it was, exactly. He was flashing his torch ahead of him and then suddenly, right ahead of him, he saw a pair of eyes. Staring back at him. Staring out of the darkness.’
Rachel felt as if her heart had stopped beating. With an effort she said: ‘Was it a … cat, maybe? Perhaps a dog fell in or something and managed to —’
‘He said it was much bigger than that. Way bigger.’
The man fell silent. Whether he believed the story or not, it was clear that he had no appetite for the work they were now being asked to do at this house. Meanwhile, his companion said simply:
‘Dumitru saw nothing. He was drunk. There’s nothing down there. It’s a big hole in the ground, that’s all.’
16
Rachel was trapped, in effect. However much she hated being in the house at night, she couldn’t leave, because she had been entrusted with the care of the children.
What she really wanted to do was pack her things, take the train north and visit Grandad in the hospice again. By all accounts he was getting weaker and weaker and she hated the thought that she might not see him again before the cancer finally claimed him. But she couldn’t move. She had to stay where she was, to watch over them, to keep guard.One night, unable to sleep, she rose from her bed at about two o’clock and sat down at the little desk overlooking the garden. As always — as she did every few minutes, during her waking hours — she looked out into the dark to see if she could see any movement around the edges of the pit, but there was nothing. The workmen had tied the tarpaulin down even more securely than before.
Turning on her desklight, she took two objects out of the topmost drawer. One was the expensive, linen-covered notebook from Venice that Lucas had bought her, as a thank-you for her help with his Oxford interview. The other was the Pelmanism card that Phoebe had given her in the summer of 2003: the drawing of a lurid giant spider that so mysteriously resembled the work of Josep Baqué. She stared at the picture for a few minutes, as she had stared at it so often, so wonderingly and so uneasily, during the last ten years. Then she opened the notebook and began to write.
*
The paradox is this: I have to assume, for the sake of my sanity, that I am going mad.
Because what’s the alternative? The alternative is to believe that the thing I saw the other night was real. And if I allowed myself to believe that, surely the horror of it would also make me lose my mind. In other words, I’m trapped. Trapped between two choices, two paths, both of which lead to insanity.
It’s the quiet. The silence, and the emptiness. That’s what has brought me to this point. I never would have imagined that, in the very midst of a city as big as this, there could be a house enfolded in such silence. For weeks, of course, I’ve been having to put up with the sound of the men working outside, underground, digging, digging, digging. But that has almost finished now, and at night, after they have gone home, the silence descends. And that’s when my imagination takes over (it is only my imagination, I have to cling to that thought), and in the darkness and the silence, I’m starting to think that I can hear things: other noises. Scratches, rustles. Movements in the bowels of the earth. As for what I saw the other night, it was a fleeting apparition, just a few seconds, some disturbance of the deep shadows at the very back of the garden, and then a clearer vision of the thing itself, the creature, but it cannot have been real. This vision cannot have been anything but a memory, come back to haunt me, and that’s why I’ve decided to revisit that memory now, to see what I can learn from it, to understand the message that it holds.