After the Armistice Ball

Chapter Eighteen

I was miles from her house before I could stop the cackling laughter ripping around my head, halfway home before my blood stopped thundering. Perhaps it was just as well, for without nerves and shivers to help me I should never have had the strength for another long drive. As it was I just about held together, but my little motor car was fizzing hot and had developed one clank and two different grinds under its bonnet when I hauled into the stable yard again, twenty hours after quitting it. It gave one last smoky bang and came to what felt like a permanent stop.

Alec, who had evidently been watching for me, came around from the drive with Bunty in tow, and as she and I fussed over each other, I quickly told him the bare bones of my news: the baby from years ago, the desecration of Cara’s body, and a little about Nettle Jennie herself.

‘Completely hopeless?’ he asked.

‘If you’d only been there,’ I said. ‘With such a witness to lean on, we’d be lucky not to be committed, never mind her. But, speaking of lunatics… What she said about Lena can’t be ignored. We shall just have to go to the police on our own and do our best. Let me wash and change and then we’ll talk it through.’

We entered the house through the gun room door, which was nearest, and as we hurried along the passageway Hugh popped his head out of the library.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘How was she?’

I blinked at him and then at Alec. What had Alec been saying?

‘Yes, how was Daisy?’ said Alec with a penetrating look at me.

‘Oh! Daisy! She was… um.’ A sudden brainwave. ‘She was utterly beside herself. And I think, I really do, that she should go to the police. Don’t you think, Alec? Blackmail, after all, is a crime.’

‘Of course,’ said Alec. Then he added stoutly, ‘Absolutely. You should ring her right now and tell her, Dandy.’ We began to walk very fast.

‘Blackmail?’ said Hugh’s voice behind us. ‘I thought it was moths.’

I asked for Croys and waited, drumming my fingers impatiently and staring at Alec without seeing him, while the operator put me through, the bell rang out and the butler answered. Then I fell to earth with a thud as he told me that Mrs Esslemont was away. I sent him to get Silas.

‘What will I say?’ I hissed to Alec, with my hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Silas doesn’t know half of what I’ve been up to. Will I try to fill him in?’

‘Just ask him where Daisy is,’ said Alec. ‘She may only be out for tea with the vicar. Calm down, Dandy, for God’s sake, and try to sound normal.’

‘Hello?’ came Silas’s voice on the line. ‘That you, Dan? You’re out of luck I’m afraid. Daisy’s not here.’

‘Where’s she off to, darling?’ I asked, in my best casual drawl. ‘How that baggage does desert you!’

‘Oh well,’ said Silas, obviously quite taken with the chance of some unforeseen self-pity. ‘I can’t complain, really. She’s on a mercy mission. Gone to see Lena Duffy.’

‘What?’ I breathed.

‘I agree,’ Silas went on. ‘After all that nonsense in the spring, I wouldn’t have said Daisy owes Lena any friendship. But Lena rang up this morning and Daisy has gone to help. Something to do with servant problems. No servants at the cottage or something? I wasn’t really listening. And then Daisy said she was off, kiss kiss darling, and see you tonight. You know how she is, lots of noise and no detail, but -’

‘Silas, I have to go,’ I said. ‘Stay by the telephone and I shall ring you as soon as I have news.’ I slammed the earpiece into the cradle.

‘Daisy has gone to see Lena,’ I said, and I could feel the colour drain out of my face too as I watched Alec pale. ‘She’s walked right into it, Alec, and it’s all my fault.’

We stared at one another in a lengthening, darkening silence. I was waiting for Alec to say there was no need to worry, not to give way to hysteria. He might have been waiting for me to say the same, but all I could think of was my letter to Daisy, that stupid, cowardly letter, designed only to save my pride. I had told her nothing that could put her on her guard, had primed her with a line which, repeated in all innocence, had delivered her unsuspecting, perhaps feeling confident, straight into Lena’s hands.

I fumbled the earpiece out of the cradle again and rattled the lever to summon the operator.

‘Edinburgh police headquarters, please,’ I said and then shoved the thing into Alec’s hands, knowing I could not rely on myself to form words. I sat down on the arm of the sofa and listened to him trying.

‘You have to send someone along there as soon as you can,’ he was saying. ‘I’ll give you the address. What? No, there has been no crime committed, not yet – except, yes, there has but unless you get there in time I – What? My name? Alexander Osborne, but it really doesn’t matter. Dorset, but listen. Listen, the woman’s name is Eleanor Duffy and the address is 28 Drummond Place in Edinburgh. There is a lady visiting there, a Mrs Esslemont… Now look, I am trying to tell you in the plainest possible terms, that Mrs Esslemont – This woman has murdered once already and… I am not drunk. Please! Someone must go to the house and get her out, before -’

He crashed the telephone down and shook his head.

‘Waste of time,’ he said. ‘If Daisy comes to any harm I shall string that idiot up with my own hands. Ring the Duffy house, Dandy.’

I summoned the operator again, and with a tut and a sigh, as though for all the world this was not exactly what she was paid for, she put me through. As it rang out, I tried to compose a speech.

‘Where is the telephone?’ I said. ‘Do you know?’

‘In the hallway,’ Alec said and nodded, knowing exactly what I was thinking. ‘Ask for Daisy,’ he went on, ‘and then tell her simply to walk out of the front door and not stop.’

And yet, even then, even as late as that, I found myself frowning and felt my face twist into an embarrassed grimace at the thought of Daisy breaking the bounds of convention at my behest, walking away from her hostess’s house without her hat or her gloves and not taking her leave. Had Daisy come to the telephone, I wonder still if I should have been able to issue the command, or whether I should have said that of course she might go and say goodbye to Lena, even finish her tea. Luckily, I was not put to the test.

‘Mrs Esslemont, madam?’ asked the butler, coldly. ‘I’m afraid you are mistaken. Mrs Esslemont is not here.’ My heart – I think it was my heart although it seemed rather lower in my body than that, lower certainly than the place one presses when one’s panic is feigned – whatever it was anyway it gave a lurching bump, but I managed to keep my voice light.

‘Might I speak to Mrs Duffy then, please?’

‘Madam is at the Perthshire house, madam,’ said the butler, if possible even more frostily.

‘I – I thought it was shut up,’ I said, relief washing over me in waves of warm and chill. Daisy would find no one at home in Edinburgh and come back safe and sound.

‘Madam has gone for the day,’ said the butler, his voice now sharp with disapproval. ‘Gone to meet a friend there.’

I let the earpiece fall and ran for the front door, leaping down the steps to Alec’s motor car, going over on my ankle in the gravel, but managing to right myself. I got the car into gear first try after Alec, eyes wide with alarm, cranked the starter. We could see Donald and Teddy standing on the lawn, mystified, as we sped down the drive.

‘They’re at Dunelgar,’ I said. ‘We can be there in half an hour.’

That half-hour was the worst experience of my life, childbirth included. We shot along the high-hedged lanes, careening round bends, spraying gravel, churning earth on the verges. My ankle shrieked every time I stepped down on the pedal, but I could not stop. Over and over I heard Silas’s voice in my head: ‘kiss kiss darling, see you tonight, you know how she is’. The affectionate exasperation, something he never troubled to hide and which had always made me feel shut out and envious of her, now hammered at me. I glanced at Alec. His knuckles were as white as gnawed drumsticks where he held on to the dashboard, and his face was stricken, a rictus only just held at bay in his clenched jaw, but he at least had no reason to blame himself for what was happening, might be happening, surely could not be happening. I snapped my eyes back to the road and pressed down harder, wincing.

Mercifully we met no jostling sheep plugging any of the little roads, no ambling lethal cordons of cows. Only one small child in a grubby pinafore playing at a puddle outside her front gate caused me to swerve and I felt the claws of a hawthorn hedge screech along the paintwork.

‘There can’t be…’ said Alec at last. ‘Can there be… Is there any innocent reason for Lena to meet Daisy in a closed-up house all alone?’

I shook my head.

‘And why on earth would Daisy agree to go?’ he demanded, worry turning him querulous. ‘What is it that Lena knows about Daisy, Dan?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘And that should at least have made me cautious about… Oh Alec, if only it weren’t for my letter. Or if only I had rung Daisy sooner, she would never have gone. At least she would have taken Silas or a servant.’ The steering wheel slipped in my hand as a sudden thought crashed in upon me. ‘Perhaps she did. Perhaps she took – oh, what’s his name? – Menzies, the chauffeur. He’s enormous, and he adores Daisy. If Menzies took her perhaps everything will be fine.’

Shock cannot be sustained for long periods of time. I have found this, and not only shock but any extremes of feeling at all. Perhaps, though, it is only me and perhaps this means there is something vital lacking in me, that I cannot keep being worried or miserable without respite for even half an hour. Anyway, I clutched at the possibility that Daisy, far from being alone in a deserted house with Lena, had rolled up with the burly and devoted Menzies at her side; Menzies, who would surely hear a raised voice resounding through empty rooms.

Another fact I have learned about shock and panic, however, is that after a rest one can return to them refreshed, as though one had simply spat on one’s hands and taken a better grip. So now the twist and grind of tension simply shifted focus, and instead of yearning just for arrival I could feel myself keening forward in my mind to the sight of Menzies and the Rolls.

‘And you’re sure, are you,’ said Alec, ‘about what Lena was holding over Cara? The baby?’

‘Nettle Jennie was sure,’ I said, ‘and I’d trust her before Dr Milne any day. Now hold on.’

We were turning into Dunelgar at last, past the little lodge house with its windows boarded up, through the one gate that lay open, only inches to spare on each side. We roared along the drive, squinting at the cars drawn up by the front door, Lena’s Bentley and what? What was behind it?

‘It’s the Vauxhall,’ said Alec. ‘She’s on her own.’

We skidded to a stop at the far side of the circle, I not trusting myself to steer any closer to the stone parapet and the other cars, my arms now flickering with fright and my fingers slipping numbly over the wheel. Alec sprinted up the steps to the door and I hurried after him, hopping and stumbling now on my swollen ankle. He wrenched the heavy door open – it was not locked – and together we stepped inside.

The shutters all around the hall were closed and light seeped in around their edges and cut slices through the dark. Reeling from the effort of standing still, we waited and listened, beginning to see shapes in the gloom, sheeted humps of furniture. Beyond them, all the doors were shut and there was not a sound.

It was almost seven o’clock and we had no idea when Daisy had set out, how long she had been here. The two cars still outside were a good sign, I thought, and it was some crazy kind of comfort to know that Lena was capable of long careful planning. Perhaps we were not too late. I forced back down the thought that came hard on the heels of that one, that we also knew she capable of action, swift and brutal.

Alec had thrown back the dust sheet on a side table by the door and was rummaging under it. He gave a grunt of satisfaction and straightened, a candlestick in each hand. He held one out to me.

‘Gilded bronze,’ he whispered. ‘They weigh a ton.’

‘But there are no candles,’ I whispered back. I saw the outline of Alec’s hair move slightly against a thin shaft of light as he shook his head.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see.’

‘Ssh,’ said Alec. ‘Come on.’

Holding the candlestick across my breast like a shield, I limped after him. The rug was rolled and tied in sacking along one wall and our footsteps sounded as loud as knocks on the bare floor, even louder as we came out into the stairwell and they caught the echo. I strained to hear another sound, a voice or a breath or even the whisper of cloth as someone moved, but all I could hear was the sound of myself listening, a tinny crackle in my ears which – I could not decide – was either my imagination, or was born of the intensity of my concentration, or even was always there but never heeded until this moment.

Softly we opened door after door, the latches protesting after their long disuse and the dirt in the hinges scraping, but in each room we saw nothing but white shapes and the silent dance of dust. Any of these muffled chairs might have an occupant. Any of these swathed, lumpy tabletops might be concealing Lena, curled and silent, and breathing as shallow as she could with her heart thrilling, or might, I knew, shroud Daisy, more silent still and beyond our help.

We stepped back to the foot of the stairs and paused before beginning to climb. The carpet on the stairs had been left in place or at any rate the felt backing had and we rose up each step without a sound. I felt my lip start to tremble and sensed the candlestick threaten to slip in my sweaty hands. I let out a breath in the smallest whimper I could, terrified that if I held it in any longer, it would end in a sob.

‘Have you seen something?’ said Alec, so quietly it was as though his voice was inside my head.

‘No,’ I breathed back. ‘It’s my foot. I twisted it.’

I suddenly realized that it was my foot and, bending, I set the candlestick down and closed my hand around the worst of the pain. It was hard and hot, bulging up around the top of my shoe. I lifted my heel, but resting all my weight on my toe was worse. Alec crouched beside me and felt first my good ankle and then the other, squeezing a little too hard and making me gasp.

‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘I’ll go on on my own.’ He must have been able to see me shake my head. ‘Well, all right, but take my arm.’

Thus we went on, I leaning heavily on Alec’s free arm, clasping his wrist tight and biting down on the knuckle of my other hand to stop the tears. Dread, shame and pain wrestled one another inside me, until each seemed to withdraw to a different part of me and settle there, the pain clenching my jaw, the dread of what was to come pounding an ache like a fence-post into my head behind my eyes, and the shame of it all – Silas’s voice – lodged like sandbags in my guts.

At the top of the stairs a passageway stretched out in both directions. To our left the meagre light slowly ran out and the corridor sank into gentle gradual darkness like a mouth, like a throat, but to our right we could see the passage turning a corner. We could see the angle of the wall and the sharp shadow it cast reaching towards us; somewhere along that way was an unshuttered window. Without speaking we started to move towards the light, and as we turned the corner, the brilliancy of it shooting out around the door at the end seemed too much to be the mild sunshine we had left outside on the drive. The door seemed to seethe with the effort of holding it and when I reached out and turned the handle it was as though the light itself burst out.

Almost in the centre of the ballroom, small and dark against the soaring windows and mirrors all around, Daisy sat primly on a wooden chair looking at her feet. I blinked and shook my head, and then I saw that her feet were taped up in what looked like a bandage and bound to one of the chair legs, together and to the side, crossed at the ankle just as we had been taught to sit at school, but her hands were behind her back instead of in her lap and the upright set of her shoulders came from the rope holding her hard to the chair-back, without which not only her head would be drooping.

I started towards her, with a howl of sour despair rising up inside me, but at my movement her head jerked up, her eyes rolling above the tape on her mouth, and her whole body began to surge, the chair creaking and rocking with each heave against the ropes. Alec got to her before me, worked her mouth free of the gag and knelt to tussle with the cord around her wrists as I took her head in my arms and held it.

‘She said no one would ever find me,’ Daisy said, working her face free of my grasp. ‘She told me no one would ever find me and Silas would never prove anything. But she must be mad. I kept telling her half a dozen people knew I was here and she couldn’t hope to get away with it, and that’s when she gagged me.’

Alec freed her wrists at last and hunched over her ankles.

‘Can you walk?’ he said. ‘Has she hurt you? Because as soon as these ropes are off you must run. I shall have to carry Dandy, so you must run along beside us.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll start now. I’ll be out before you. I’ll hop.’

Alec put out a hand and gripped my arm so tightly my fingers tingled.

‘Don’t go out of my sight,’ he said, still working at the bandage with his one free hand. I moved back to stand by Daisy.

‘Where is she?’ I asked, but before it was out of my mouth I heard footsteps, brisk, light, tapping towards us. A door in the panelling opened slowly outward and I caught a glimpse of a dark stone-lined corridor, a service corridor. Lena nudged the flap of the door wide with her hip, her eyes down, concentrating on the crowded tray of objects she carried.

We stood frozen while she negotiated the door, even Alec’s hands stopping their worrying to watch Lena edge into the ballroom and look up from the tray. Slowly, she took in the sight of us. Then she turned with a quickness that startled at least me and hurled the tray back through the gap in the closing door to scatter its contents on the stone floor of the passage.

I never knew what she had planned for Daisy, never saw what was on the tray, but the sounds it made when it fell stayed with me for years no matter how I tried to keep them out of my ears, and more especially my dreams. Metal rang on stone, glass shattered and heavy, dull objects thumped and rolled away. Lena smoothed down her apron – it was not until then that I noticed she wore an enveloping white apron – and walked towards us. She looked quite as tranquil as I had ever seen her. More so perhaps, I thought, as she drew near. Her face had a limpid serenity that I had never seen there before, and it was more grotesque than rolling eyes and drooling mouth would have been. I thought again of Alec and his pie and the headless Sergeant Pinner, imagining that Alec would have had just this smooth look on his face as he ate. It was the look of madness, when all the guy-ropes of the everyday have finally been shrugged off and the mind floats up and is gone.

Lena looked at each of us in turn, smiling gently, then rested her gaze on me and spoke.

‘Tell me then, my dear. Have you been watching me?’

I nodded, and Lena nodded along with me, still smiling.

‘I thought so. I thought so,’ she said. ‘And so it is all my own doing. I tried to use you, my dear Mrs Gilver. Perhaps if I hadn’t invited you to Kirkandrews to witness our tragedy…? Tell me, what did I do wrong?’

I gaped at her but then it dawned upon me that this was not meant to open a moral debate but merely to ask where she had betrayed herself to me, and when I tried to think of an answer I found I could not. Where had she gone wrong? Where had the suspicion come from, seeping invisibly like gas, until one was enveloped in the miasma, cut off from all the sight, sound and smell of the world but still unable to believe any of it was real?

Smiling, she waited for me to speak and as she did the smile changed, becoming as gaudy and jagged as a lizard’s fan.

‘You don’t even know, do you?’ she said, speaking now through clenched teeth, making thick white spots of saliva gather at the corners of her mouth. ‘Bumbling cow of a woman that you are. I chose the stupidest person in the room. So stupid. How I should hate to be you – Dandelion Gilver – bumping around in the fog like a sheep, too stupid to see how stupid you are…’

‘No need to run through the whole farmyard,’ said Alec’s voice, steady but strained. ‘And you’re wrong as it happens. It’s not stupidity, it’s goodness.’

Lena threw back her head and whooped.

‘Goodness? Goodness?’

‘Goodness,’ said Alec, ‘which could not help but see evil in front of it. Dandy’s goodness meant that she could smell you like a rotting corpse. I don’t expect you to understand. Something as vile as you are can’t hope to recognize it.’

I wished he would stop. Lena was beginning to seethe, visibly, rocking back and forward on her heels. I had no fear that she would overpower Alec and escape but I wanted desperately to talk to her and get some answers before she crawled into her madness and pulled it over herself for good.

‘Why did you do it?’ I asked, my voice loud enough to cut through Alec’s hectoring. She rounded on me, but I refused to flinch.

I asked her again.

‘Why did you do it?’

‘Are you too “good” even to imagine, then, Mrs Gilver?’

‘Not at all,’ I said, surprising myself with the level drawl I managed to get into my voice. ‘Only I should like to know if my theories are accurate. Why did you do it? Why did you start it?’

‘Because,’ she said, stepping very close to me so that the spittle fell on my face as she spoke. Alec rose and moved towards us, but I put up a hand to stop him.

‘Because,’ she said again, ‘they were mine.’

‘Of course they were yours,’ I whispered, sickened, amazed that I could still be sickened by anything. ‘But why would you want to hurt them?’

‘You stupid woman,’ she said. ‘You stupid, blind pig of a woman. Not the girls. The diamonds. Those diamonds were mine. I loved them and they were nothing to him, just as they should have been nothing to you.’ She rounded on Alec and, unable to meet his eyes, glared at his chest. ‘You and that little tart and all the little tarts you would have bred. It was an outrage to think he could give them to you when they were mine.’

‘So you stole them,’ I said. ‘But -’

‘I didn’t steal them,’ said Lena, suddenly very loud. ‘You can’t steal what is already yours. I simply took them. He would have left them to that little tart along with everything else and I couldn’t stand for that.’

‘But then you went too far,’ I said. ‘You tried to steal them twice and when it seemed as though nothing would ever bring it to light you told Cara to sell them.’

‘She couldn’t have anyway,’ said Daisy. ‘They belonged to her father.’

‘They belonged to me,’ said Lena. ‘They were mine. They have belonged to the ladies of the Duffy family, generation after generation for three hundred years.’

‘Cara was a lady of the Duffy family, you old fool,’ said Daisy.

‘Oh yes,’ screamed Lena. ‘Cara, precious Cara, precious Cara Duffy. Little tart.’

‘And why pick on us?’ Daisy demanded. ‘What have I ever done? What has Silas?’

‘Filth,’ spat Lena. ‘Parading around all that money and underneath, nothing but filth.’

‘You’re mad,’ said Daisy. ‘You’re not even making any sense.’

Lena’s eyes rolled.

‘So you told her to sell them,’ I insisted, laying a hand on Daisy’s shoulder trying to quiet her, trying to keep Lena with us. ‘And then what?’

‘She couldn’t be trusted,’ said Lena. ‘Much better, really. Much neater that way. I had the use of her and then she could go. She was going to get all of it, you know. He just couldn’t see past his precious little darling. He didn’t know her like I did. What a dirty little slut she was. She had to go.’

There was one question I knew I must ask.

‘Could you have done it? Could you have killed your own child in cold blood?’

‘Is it too awful for you to imagine?’ said Lena. ‘With all your goodness. Could I? Of course I could. I’m vile and evil, Mrs Gilver, I’m wicked and mad. So my own child doesn’t matter any more to me than an ant under my shoe. Weren’t you listening?’ Her eyes were glittering with amusement now.

‘But you didn’t get the chance,’ I said, and I saw her face flash with something I did not understand, just for a moment.

‘Of course I had the chance,’ she said. ‘What are you talking about? I made the chance, and I took the chance.’

‘But something went wrong,’ I insisted. Her eyes flashed again.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Something changed your plans. What happened? What did she tell you to make you so angry?’ Lena’s eyes were still huge with fear but her shoulders dropped a little.

‘She told me what she had done. What she was. Who could bear to hear what a stinking, filthy tart she was all along?’

‘But you knew that,’ I said. ‘You said you knew what she was.’ Lena looked away from me and I saw a cold resolve settle into her face. Then she took a huge breath, threw back her head and shrieked.

Still screeching, she took three enormous steps backwards so that all of us were in the sweep of her gaze. There was something ridiculous about the extravagance of the steps, like a second-rate Shakespearean actor of the old school, or like the game I used to play as a child. Giants’ Steps and Babies’ Steps, it was called, and that was what Lena’s giant steps looked like, as unreal and yet as deliberate as that.

‘I killed her,’ she screamed. ‘Do you hear me? I killed her and if I hang it will still be worth it.’ She spoke as though she were Boadicea giving her battle cry, as though she were Joan of Arc declaiming her creed, triumph in her voice and her shoulders thrown back to take the arrows in her breast, but her eyes were the eyes of an animal threshing in a snare as the gamekeeper draws near it. I stepped towards her, staring, peering deep into that animal’s eyes.

‘How could you?’ I said. ‘How could you do that to your own child?’ The fear flared again; I saw it. Something small inside her had leapt up and just managed to see out of her eyes for one second before it fell back down. Then she regarded me with some of the old calmness, and she spoke softly to me, just to me, too soft for the others to hear.

‘You stupid woman,’ she said.

I stared at her, feeling something shift, but it was far too deep to tell what it was, and then she turned on her heels and ran.

Alec took two steps after her, stopped, wheeled back, swayed for a second. We could hear Lena’s footsteps racing away.

‘Go,’ I yelled at him.

He skidded over the ballroom floor and was gone. The ring of his shoes on the bare floor joined the clatter of Lena’s heels and then both became muffled as they reached the top of the stairs and flew down over the felted treads. A scream, then a confusion of thumps and knocks, a shout from Alec, and silence. I knew at once what had happened.

Carefully, I lowered myself beside Daisy and stretched out my throbbing foot before bending over the ropes.

‘I left my candlestick on the stairs,’ I said. Then I looked down and smiled as the tangle under my fingers began to loosen. ‘Typical. Boys are never any good at untying knots.’

‘Hence penknives,’ said Daisy, getting stiffly to her feet and shaking herself free of the coils. ‘Now, put your hands around my neck, darling, and let me help you up.’

We had just begun to limp across what looked like an acre of gleaming floor, her two numbed legs about as useful as my good one, when Alec appeared in the doorway, his face puckered, one of Lena’s shoes dangling from his hand.

‘She tripped,’ he said, walking slowly towards us. ‘I tried to catch her. I almost caught her.’ He looked down at the shoe, regarded it for a long time, then set it carefully on the floor and swung me up into his arms.

‘I can offer you an arm,’ he said to Daisy, but his voice was strained, and even as he spoke he braced his legs – I am no sylph, even had he not been shaking with exhaustion – and so Daisy assured him that she was fine.

At the head of the stairs he turned and began to shuffle down awkwardly sideways, almost pressing me against the banisters.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Let me see her.’ So he faced around the way he was going again and down we went towards Lena.

One of her hands was hooked through the banister rail by a snapped wrist and her head lay crushed against her shoulder. Her face was hidden, only the nape of her neck showing. I could see pins sticking out from under her old-fashioned bun, plain metal pins never meant to be seen, and I was surprised by the skin on her neck, soft and plumply crumpled, with some sparse downy hair, too short for the hairpins, which had sprung into curls.

Daisy stopped as she drew level and crouched down to look at her.

‘Are you sure?’ she said.

‘Absolutely,’ said Alec. ‘We must go and find a telephone and ring the police. I’ll put Dandy in the car and come back for you.’

‘We can’t just leave her here alone,’ said Daisy. ‘Take Dandy to a doctor, Alec darling, and telephone from there. I shall wait here and keep watch. Yes, yes, I promise not to touch anything. But we can’t leave her alone.’

I should have offered to stay. I did not know then that my ankle was broken, and Daisy had had it much worse than me, tied up and thinking she was going to be hurt. I should have insisted that I stay with Lena’s body. Why did I not? Simple: I was scared. I still did not feel safe. But safe from what? From the horror of what we thought she had done? That was what I told myself. That was how I explained why I still felt lost and how I made sense of the shifting inside me, slow but relentless, like sand on the ocean floor.