She was not sure what time it was; when she looked at the sun she could understand that it had changed position but she did not dare to say how much. There were cruise ships coming in, vast white curved blocks like severed feet shuffling across the water. She waved halfhearted welcome. She felt the wind lift her hair above her head. In daylight the water was so blue that the colour seemed like a lie and she leant over, hoping for a moment of shift that would allow her to understand what was beneath the sea. Was this where the goodlady lived? That was how you caught a magical creature, you found out where it lived and you laid traps for it.
Her hands were pinned behind her and she was knocked down by a deft kick to the back of her knee. All this was done in complete silence. She lay and frowned into the grass, began to get up and was stopped by the fact of a knife held near her face. It was so sharp. Where it cut, her flesh would hang neatly but separated, like soft dominoes.
“Oh God,” said Miranda. “Come on. Really?”
A girl she recognised but had never spoken to was crouched by her, holding the knife. She was one of the Kosovan girls. The girl hissed at her. “Why don’t you stay away from our boys?”
Miranda said, “May I get up, please?” She was lying on her front and it was hurting her neck to have to look up so steadily.
“No, you certainly may not,” the girl said, mimicking Miranda’s accent. Then she grew serious again. “Did you hear me? I said, why don’t you stay away from our boys?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Another girl came into view, looking so much like the first girl that Miranda thought she might be hallucinating.
“We saw you,” the second girl said. “You and Amir, you and Farouk, you and Agim, you and whoever. Then they end up getting stabbed.”
Miranda thought about screaming. But she’d never been one for raising her voice, and an unpractised scream would just dissolve into seawater.
Instead she said, “Listen, I really don’t know what or whom you are talking about. You have mistaken me for someone else.”
Tijana appeared behind the first two girls.
Miranda said, “Tijana—”
“Agim is my cousin.” She said it flatly, and she said it in such a way that Miranda understood that these girls really and truly meant to hurt her. She struggled to her feet, and the girls were around in a tight circle, their arms linked. Their hair, which looked so rigid, was soft and greasy and synthetically perfumed. Miranda gagged, and they rocked her, the three of them, rocked her close enough to the cliff edge to make her stutter, “Don’t, please don’t.”
“Agim is my cousin,” Tijana repeated.
“Who is Agim?” Miranda asked, desperately.
Silence and adamant eyes.
“I’ve been away for months,” Miranda babbled. “Doing my lessons in bed. I’ve been… away. If you’re talking about the stabbings I’ve no idea…”
Tijana looked into Miranda’s eyes and seemed, for the first time, unsure.
“She’s lying, man. It’s her,” one of the other girls said, then, to Miranda, “Now you tell us how the fuck you’re involved with this or I cut you.”
“Hold on,” Tijana said. “Maybe she means it. It may be. She wasn’t at school for months.”
Miranda took a close look at the back of her mind while the other two girls considered. She thought she might faint. Whoever Agim was, she didn’t want him to come. Because if these girls thought she was someone else, then Agim would too. She had to get away. The girls lessened their grip on her while they argued, and Miranda stepped out of her shoes. Miranda bent over and retched and when they jumped clear, she ran.
She pushed and kicked Eliot’s bike so that it rattled far ahead of her until the way was smooth enough for her to scramble onto it, nearly tipping it over, and she pedalled harder even than her heart was thumping. She didn’t know where she was going; she had forgotten the way home. She weaved through Market Square, narrowly avoiding riding straight into the fountain, then she passed through side streets that branched off the high street, slowing and remembering herself once she was sure she’d lost Tijana and the other girls. She made her way home and sat on the flint steps, freezing and mourning her beautiful, black pointy-toed court shoes, whose leather would be destroyed by the inquisitive tongues of the sheep that wandered on the cliffs.
When she finally went into the house, there were three cardboard boxes on the staircase that led up from the ground floor. Sade, the new housekeeper, and her father were arguing and laughing in the dining room.
“Sade. First of all let me tell you that you can’t put pepper in the baked beans, you really can’t.”
“Why not? They don’t taste of anything.”
Miranda looked inside one of the boxes, not knowing what she expected to see — garish prints, a Bible, a huge cross — but the box was packed solid with books. Dickens and the Brontës, even. She picked a couple of them up — each had a huge white S slashed across the title page.
Two houseguests picked their way around the first of the boxes on their way downstairs. They were a black couple from London who had enthused about their love of British history while Miranda had swayed, glassy-eyed and dead on her feet, and drawn red circles around the Cinque Ports on a map of Kent for them.
In order to avoid a repeat occurrence, she sidestepped into the sitting room and looked through the old newspapers for the issue of The Dover Post that Eliot had handed her when Luc had brought her back from the clinic. There was Tijana’s cousin’s name, Agim Hajdari. He’d sustained serious wounds but had recovered. He’d been found curled up in a ball between a wall and a tree on Priory Lodge road, arms crossed over himself. As if to hold his insides in, Miranda thought.
After some time she noticed Eliot had come home. He was standing in the sitting-room doorway with his arms crossed.
“I’m sorry I took your bike! But I think it was fated. Some girls tried to kill me,” she said, as soon as she saw him. “And the bike revealed itself as my trusty getaway steed.”
By the time she’d explained properly, he was pacing the room worriedly. “We have to sort this out,” he said. “These girls sound deluded enough to keep coming after you, especially if… anything else happens.”
“What shall I do?” Miranda asked.
“Two choices. Number one — Martin and I go after these girls and beat them with sticks — okay, you’re not keen, fair enough — number two, we talk to Tijana tomorrow and meet this cousin of hers and get him to tell them that you’ve got nothing to do with all of this.”
He stopped and looked at her carefully.
“Because you haven’t got anything to do with this,” he reminded her. “I mean, what? The very idea of it is…”
Miranda crumpled the sheets of newspaper on her lap.
“I am very concerned,” she said, in a small voice, “that this will not end well. They seemed convinced that they’d seen me before.”
Eliot pulled her to her feet. “There is no way, Miri,” he said. “No way in the world.” Grey eyes convince so well, burying the person they look at in truth like flung pebbles. But Miranda could never do that with her eyes; convince. Anyway she was never sure about anything.
“Come and have some dinner,” he said.
“In a minute,” she said. “Go. I’ll see you in there.”
“The new housekeeper is interesting,” he said, on his way out of the room. “She asked Dad if he had any shirts he didn’t want, and now she’s slashing his old shirts by hand in the kitchen. I think she’s, er, making something. Arts and crafts.”