Number 11

1

My name is Livia and I come from Bucharest.

We have a saying in my country: Totul trebuie s aib un început. Which means: Everything must have a beginning. So I will begin my story like this.

I have been living in London for more than five years, and my job is taking the dogs of very rich people for their daily walk. Most of my clients live in Chelsea. I used to live there myself but then the rents became so high that I moved out to Wandsworth so now every day I begin by taking a bus across the river. I look out through the windows of the bus as we cross the bridge, and from that point on, every time the bus gets to another stop I can see the signs of wealth more and more clearly inscribed in the streets and feel the air itself getting heavier with the tangy scent of money.

I get off at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and then walk towards The Boltons. The houses here are big and beautiful. Well-tended gardens hide behind walls which are as smart and politely forbidding as a security guard at an exclusive nightclub. Closedcircuit cameras sprout among the ivy and the sycamore trees. My first call of the day involves stopping outside one of these walls. There is a small green door in the wall and, next to it, a discreet keypad upon which, if you possess the secret knowledge, you can enter a five-digit code which admits you to this earthly paradise. I have been coming here every day for fourteen months but I have not yet been told the code.

Instead, I have to send a text message to a Malaysian housemaid, who shortly afterwards emerges to open the door in the wall. She is accompanied by a large, bright-eyed, restless black Labrador. This is Clarissa. She at least greets me like a friend. So now I take her for her walk. If today is a busy day I will only take her as far as Brompton Cemetery. If I have plenty of time we will go all the way to Hyde Park.

Sometimes in Hyde Park I meet Jane. I can always recognize Jane, even from a distance, by the number of dogs she will have with her. Always four or five; sometimes as many as ten. If the dogs will allow her, we’ll sit at the café next to the Serpentine and drink coffee together.

Shortly after we first met, Jane told me her story. She used to work in the City of London as a trader for one of the world’s leading investment banks. After a while she realized that she had hit a ceiling and would never make as much money as her male colleagues. Also the stress and the long hours were damaging her health. She left her job and spent a few weeks resting. As a favour, she started walking a friend’s dog while he was at work, and then other working people started asking her to walk their dogs for them. She charged her clients £20 an hour for each dog and they paid her in cash. By walking many dogs at once she found that she could sometimes make £500 in a day — or as much as £100,000 every year, but without paying any tax. More than she had earned in the City.

In addition to this, she liked walking, and she liked dogs.

In the middle of the morning I return Clarissa to her home in The Boltons. Once again I send a text message to the housekeeper and we exchange a few words as she takes her back. As I say goodbye to the dog I wonder what kind of life she leads away from me, on the other side of the wall. I have never seen her owners. I know nothing at all about the family she belongs to. All I know is that they never seem to be at home.

But the word ‘home’ can mean different things. Whenever I return to Romania I feel that I’m coming home but I also regard my little flat in Wandsworth as home, even though I’ve only lived there for a year and a half. It feels like my home because I come back to it every night to feel rested and safe, and I’ve filled it with objects that I love because they mean something to me.

These beautiful big houses in Chelsea are not homes in any sense that I understand. For most of the year they stand empty. Or at least, you think they are empty, but inside, there is a kind of life taking place. A phantom life. Members of staff — cleaners and cooks and chauffeurs — dust haunted rooms and polish cars in underground garages during the morning, and then gather together in the kitchen at midday to eat silent lunches. Dogs sit by windows and look out into gardens and wonder why their owners bothered to buy them in the first place. Meanwhile, the family is … where? The father is in Singapore, the mother is in Geneva, the children … who knows.

Other houses here are even emptier. They contain no furniture, no curtains at the windows, no pictures on the walls. They are always dark. In the winter, when I come back from the park or the cemetery to return the last of my dogs to its owner’s house, the silence and darkness of these streets begins to frighten me. It is as if some terrible plague has come to London and everybody has had to leave but nobody has told me. Once I walked back from the park with Jane, through the streets of Chelsea, and she explained to me that people buy these houses now — rich people — and then just let them stand there, watching money attach to them like barnacles to a sunken ship.

‘Think about it,’ she said. ‘A house like this may be worth thirty-five million pounds. Its value appreciates at the rate of ten per cent — three and a half million every year. That’s seventy thousand pounds a week. Ten thousand pounds every day. What else do you have to do, apart from buy it, and then just leave it alone? The people who own this house —’ (she pointed at the white stuccoed mansion opposite us in the street) ‘— are ten thousand pounds richer than when we walked past here this morning.’

I always learn something new, when I talk to Jane. Sometimes what she tells me fills me with a reluctant kind of respect for the people who understand, much better than I do, how to acquire and increase wealth. Other times I think that, just as a certain famous Romanian used to suck the blood from his victims’ necks, now it is money itself that has begun to drain the life out of this great city.

2

Rachel stood still and rested for a while, hands on hips, listening to the noise of the wind as it rustled the branches of the plum tree. It was one of her favourite sounds in the whole world.

It was quiet here, this breezy September afternoon. The wind rustled the branches even though the branches were laden. It had been a good crop this year. A bumper crop, that was always the expression, wasn’t it? The plums were ripe: their skins powdery and purple-pink. Rachel’s basket was three-quarters full even after ten minutes’ picking.

It had become a ritual now, a family tradition. In the middle of September, she would come to her grandparents’ house in Beverley for a few days, and one afternoon she would take out the old wooden ladder from the garage, and lay it against the sturdiest branch of the tree, and climb up to pick the plums which her grandparents were no longer strong or agile enough to harvest. For the last three years, this had been the prelude to her setting out for Oxford at the beginning of October. But the Oxford days were over now. She had finished her studies, and graduated, and was facing an empty, uncertain future, with a lovely big burden of debt to accompany her. For the last three months she had been living with her mother in Leeds, answering job adverts and sending out CVs. All to no effect, so far, although a couple of private tutorial agencies in London had added her to their books. Something would come up, she was sure. All she could do was to keep trying.

She ate one of the plums, spat the stone out, then took the ladder and leaned it up against a different branch of the tree, facing the house now. This way she could reach some of the topmost fruit. After climbing the ladder, she could also see across the back garden and into her grandparents’ bedroom, where Gran was sitting up on the bed. She had the Telegraph spread out on her lap but she wasn’t reading it. She had her head thrown back and her mouth half open, but she wasn’t asleep either, as Rachel had first thought: after a few seconds she raised herself, drank from the mug of tea on her bedside table and stared tiredly around her. She looked pale and anxious. Grandad had been ill for about a week now, with stomach cramps, vomiting and diarrhoea. They both referred to it as his ‘tummy bug’, and for several days this is what everyone had thought it was, but this morning there had been blood in his stools so Gran and Rachel had phoned the GP and on her advice driven him straight to the hospital. Grandad had been put on a ward without too much delay and this afternoon they were going to do some tests. ‘It’s probably just a really nasty tummy bug,’ Gran kept saying, and Rachel wanted to believe her, wanted to believe there was nothing seriously wrong, but still …

The feeling she had was not strong enough to be called a premonition. It was hardly even strong enough to be called a feeling. But in the rustling of the branches as the wind brushed against them, Rachel thought that she could hear the quietest, most evanescent whisper of something momentous. It was quite different from the way that, eleven years earlier, the death of David Kelly had made her feel. That death had chilled her, even as a young girl. It had seemed not just final, but tragic and unnecessary. Whereas, the message that the wind was trying to bring her — and it wasn’t necessarily about death, she couldn’t allow herself to believe that, just yet — was less shocking, less unforeseen, but somehow even sadder. It had a kind of gentle inevitability about it. It belonged to the same cycle of seasons that brought rich clusters of fruit to this tree at the end of every summer.

The near-silence of the afternoon was broken, at this point, by the muffled shrilling of Rachel’s smartphone as it vibrated in her pocket. Contorting herself carefully on the ladder, she managed to ease the phone out of her pocket and bring it to her ear, noting as she did so that the caller info on the screen said simply ‘Albion’.

‘Hello?’ she said, and a couple of minutes later she was shimmying down the ladder and running back into the house, upstairs to her grandparents’ bedroom, where she woke Gran, who had finally fallen into a doze, and said:

‘Gran, Gran, I’m really sorry to wake you up, but I’m going to have to go. I’ve got a job. I’m going to have to go home and pack.’

‘Oh, lovey, that’s wonderful news,’ said Gran, although she looked more bewildered than happy.

‘I’m really sorry to leave you by yourself.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’

‘Maybe Mum can come and stay with you for a bit.’

‘I’ll be fine. I can look after myself.’

‘Yes, but … waiting to hear from the hospital and everything …’

‘Oh, that’ll be all right. He’s just got a nasty tummy bug. I expect he’ll be coming home tomorrow. Or even tonight.’

‘OK,’ said Rachel, uncertainly. ‘As long as you’re sure.’

‘It’s wonderful that you’ve got a job, after all that waiting. Is it those tutoring people?’

‘That’s right. It’s only for a week, though.’

‘Never mind. It’s a start, isn’t it? It’s bound to lead to something else.’

‘I hope so. I’m just sorry I’m going to be so far away when you’re waiting for Grandad’s results.’

‘Oh, London isn’t far away.’

‘The job isn’t in London. It’s in —’ (and Rachel found herself frowning even as she said it, since even to her it seemed so unlikely, even though Mr Campion had been quite clear about it on the phone) ‘— South Africa.’

3

As soon as the butler showed her to her tent, Rachel realized that it was not really a tent at all. In fact, the presence of a butler should itself have been a giveaway. The servant, dressed in fez and long white tunic, said nothing to her until they reached the huge canopied space, shaded by jackalberry trees, where a king-size double bed dominated the living area. Even then, he kept his words to a minimum.

‘Toilet,’ he said, opening the door to the toilet.

‘Shower,’ he said, opening the door to the shower.

‘Table,’ he said, pointing to the relevant item, a handsome rosewood dining table at the far end of the decking, commanding a fine view of the swimming pool and the surrounding tents, all of which, at this hour of the day, were empty.

‘This is … beautiful,’ said Rachel, more or less lost for words. ‘Where are Mr and Mrs Gunn?’

‘Sir Gilbert and her ladyship are on safari,’ said the butler. ‘The children as well. They will be back at six o’clock in time for dinner. They said, Relax, Make yourself comfortable.’

‘Thank you,’ said Rachel. ‘I will.’

‘I’ll bring some food,’ said the butler. ‘You want wine, champagne?’

‘Just water, please,’ said Rachel. ‘A bottle of cold water.’

‘You have water,’ said the butler, opening the door of the minibar. ‘But I will bring some more.’

Before he left, Rachel wondered whether she was supposed to tip him — she had absolutely no idea of the protocol at places like this — but realized in any case that she had no local currency. She had not paid for anything so far — not the connecting flight from Johannesburg to the Skukuza aerodrome, nor the chauffered Land Rover which had brought her to the camp — nor did she have any means of doing so, apart from a Visa card with a credit limit which would probably not cover the half of it. Besides, she already felt uncomfortable, being waited on by this courteous, statuesque black man, and thought that the offer of a tip might be patronizing. It was just one of the many confusing aspects of the ridiculous situation in which she found herself.

The butler spared her any further embarrassment by leaving wordlessly. Rachel unpacked her things and then took the first of many showers (it was midday, and outrageously hot). After which, she sat on the decking, drinking her water and looking once again through the blue plastic folder with the Albion Tutorials logo, and beneath it their enigmatic strapline: ‘Delivering British Educational Solutions to International Clients’.

It didn’t, of course, answer any of the questions that were pulsing through her head. Why had she been brought here at such short notice? How long would she be staying? What were her duties supposed to be? Mr Campion (Bill, as he’d kept telling her to call him) hadn’t been able to enlighten her much.

‘Don’t be freaked out about it,’ he’d said. ‘These people have a lot of money. To you, it may seem like a big deal that they’re flying you all the way out there. But to them, it really isn’t. You’re going there to do some work with Lucas, Sir Gilbert’s son from his first marriage. For some reason Sir Gilbert took a dislike to the last tutor and hasn’t renewed his contract. He says you don’t need to take out any books or anything like that. I think he has something in mind that’s a bit … more general. He has two daughters, as well — twins — by his current marriage, to the second Lady Gunn, who I believe used to be a fashion model, and is originally from Kazakhstan. I don’t think you’ll be having much to do with them on this trip. Just relax and enjoy it. It’s not everyone who gets to go on a luxury safari without paying!’

‘Relax and enjoy it.’ That had been the advice, but Rachel was finding it impossible to follow. She spent the afternoon lying on her bed, regretting the fact that there was no cell phone coverage in the Kruger national park, and wondering if her grandfather’s test results had come through yet.

*

Shortly after six o’clock, the stillness of the camp was broken by the arrival of a jeep, carrying three African guides and a family of five. The guides were in good spirits as they helped the family down the high step from the vehicle to ground level. There were two pretty young girls of about eight or nine, and a tall, handsome, but slightly pale and dreamy-looking boy in his late teens. Sir Gilbert Gunn was in his mid-fifties, grey-haired and serious: Rachel recognized him from the picture on his Wikipedia page. The elegant blonde accompanying him, some twenty years his junior, was presumably his second wife, Madiana. ‘Don’t appear too shy or backward,’ Mr Campion had said, ‘they won’t appreciate it. They only like strong people.’ So she bounded down the steps from her tent and held out her hand in greeting.

‘Hello,’ she said, ‘I’m Rachel. From Albion Tutors. Thank you for bringing me here.’

The guides dispersed, looking tired but still cheerful. Sir Gilbert, his wife and their children did not, on the other hand, seem especially invigorated by their day’s activities.

‘Not at all. Thank you for coming,’ said Sir Gilbert, giving her hand the briefest of shakes. ‘Excuse me while I go and freshen up.’

‘Was the safari good?’ Rachel asked.

‘There were no lions,’ said Madiana, brushing past her, and addressing the remark more to her husband than to anybody else. ‘For the third time, no lions.’

‘You can’t just lay lions on on tap, you know,’ said Sir Gilbert, heading for his tent without looking back. ‘We saw bloody rhinos and elephants, for God’s sake. What more do you want?’

‘They want lions, obviously,’ said Lucas, the teenager, in a weary voice as he made for a different tent. Madiana and the two girls — who looked hot and disgruntled — trudged towards a third tent, the one nearest the swimming pool: this meant, Rachel realized, that Sir Gilbert’s family and entourage accounted for four out of the six tents in camp. She later found out that the other two were empty, and that he had actually booked the entire camp for the week.

‘Come and see me in fifteen minutes,’ he called back to her. ‘We’ll have a drink and I’ll tell you what I want.’

‘Fine,’ said Rachel, and returned briefly to her own quarters.

Dusk was falling as she made her way to Sir Gilbert’s tent fifteen minutes later. A slow, magnificent sunset was in progress, with a shimmering ochre sun casting valedictory rays through the canopy of trees, while the cicadas sang and the night birds began their early chorus. Sir Gilbert was drinking a gin and tonic at his table and seemed to be enjoying the sunset, although, as Rachel was to learn over the next few months, he was not much given to revealing his emotions.

‘Not a bad spot,’ was all he said to her.

‘It’s amazing,’ said Rachel.

‘Been here before?’

‘No. This is very much a first, for me.’

‘Wouldn’t have been my first choice,’ he said. ‘But the kids wanted to see some animals and, you know … They take priority.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘So,’ he said, after summoning the butler and ordering a glass of white wine for Rachel, ‘about my son. When he’s not at school he mostly lives with his mother, so I don’t take much responsibility for how he’s turned out.’

‘Which school does he go to?’ Rachel asked.

‘Eton. Just starting his last year there, which means he’s got university interviews coming up in a few months. He’s aiming for maths at Oxford. You were at Oxford, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t go to public school?’

‘No.’

‘Good. That’s what they told me. Well, the crux of the matter is this. Because of the cock-eyed ideology which permeates education in Britain at the moment, Oxford colleges are under a lot of pressure to favour state-educated pupils like yourself. I believe it’s called “inclusivity”. Or “anti-elitism”. Whatever you call it, the upshot is that boys like Lucas, who’s never seen the inside of a state school in his life, have to try extra hard to make the right impression. His mother’s spoiled him. I don’t believe I’ve spoiled him, but I’ve certainly spent a lot of money on him over the last seventeen years, which I think is only natural when it comes to your own offspring. Not surprisingly, he’s turned out cocky, arrogant and with a sense of entitlement you can spot from ten miles away. None of which would have been a problem, in the past, but nowadays, as I said, this sort of thing apparently puts people’s backs up at our great centres of learning. So what we’ve got to do is try to knock some of it out of him. Do you follow?’

‘Sort of …’ Rachel said, although there was no mistaking the note of uncertainty in her voice.

‘Well, I’ll put it as simply as I can,’ said Sir Gilbert. ‘I want you to turn my son into a normal person.’

Rachel would have considered this a bizarre request at the best of times. Here, disorientated after her long journey, she thought it stranger than ever, and for a moment she found herself wondering if she had somehow passed through a looking glass in the last twenty-four hours, and emerged into a parallel world where the everyday rules and assumptions had been inverted.

‘A normal person?’ she repeated.

‘Yes. I want him to be able to open his mouth without it sounding as though he thinks he owns the world and everything in it.’

Rachel took a deep breath. ‘OK then. I’ll … see what I can do about that.’

‘You have a very strong accent,’ said Sir Gilbert. ‘What is it, Lancashire?’

‘Yorkshire. You don’t want me to give him a Yorkshire accent, do you?’

‘No. I don’t really care what you do to him. Talk to him, read to him, whatever it takes. You can start tomorrow at nine. Spend the day with him and see what you can manage.’

With that, he picked up his iPad and began reading a magazine article. Rachel realized that this was his way of telling her the conversation was at an end.

*

The next morning, Lucas did not go on safari with the others. Nor did his father. Rachel imagined, at first, that Sir Gilbert wanted to stay behind to keep a watchful eye on their tutorial, but it turned out that this was not the case at all. He took no notice of them, and confined himself to his tent, where he busied himself with his iPad, a slim leather briefcase full of documents and a number of phone calls. (While mobile reception was non-existent for Rachel, Sir Gilbert had brought along what seemed to be some sort of military satellite phone — a chunky piece of kit complete with retractable aerial — and he spent a good deal of the morning talking on it.)

Rachel quite enjoyed her morning talking to Lucas. She had encountered a number of Etonians at Oxford, and although they came, of course, in very different forms, she knew that there was one thing they all had in common: a tremendous air of confidence. This confidence, she had always felt, was a wonderful asset: what a great feeling it must be, to know that your wealth and education would not just insulate you against some of the worst of the world’s hardships, but prepare you for a life in which your destiny, handed down as if by birthright, was to control the lives of others. But it was hardly surprising that this confidence, nurtured and encouraged by fierce parental ambition, could easily turn to unbearable arrogance, and this was no doubt what Sir Gilbert feared in his son’s case.

In fact, after a few hours’ conversation, she had the impression that Lucas was not so much arrogant as depressed. Maths was not his own choice of university subject, it seemed. His real passion was Classical Civilization, but ‘Mum vetoed that,’ he told her. ‘She says it’s a Mickey Mouse subject.’ Maths, it had been decided instead, would better prepare him for the job in the City for which his whole education had, up until this point, been a mere laying of the groundwork. Rachel decided that what he really needed was a training in interview technique: every question that she asked him, about art, about drama (another passion), about books, about politics, produced not a thoughtful or reflective answer, but some boastful comeback about the prize he had won for an essay, or the top marks he had been given for his coursework, or the speech he had made that had won a standing ovation, or the famous author whose children he’d been on holiday with. Every reflex in his brain seemed to be geared towards competition and one-upmanship. None of this, Rachel thought, was exactly his fault, and she only really lost patience with him once, when he told her that failing to get into Oxford would be a personal disaster because it would mean ‘I might end up at some Mickey Mouse university with a lot of chavs’. At which point she proposed that they break for lunch.

Shortly before noon — presumably having taken the same flight that had brought Rachel to Skukuza the day before — another guest arrived. He ate lunch with Lucas and Sir Gilbert, while Rachel was seemingly expected to eat by herself, at her own table on the decking of her own tent, but when the meal was over, the new arrival made a point of coming over to introduce himself.

‘Hello,’ he said, stretching out the word in what Rachel could only assume was intended to be a flirtatious manner. ‘And who have we here?’

‘My name’s Rachel,’ she said. ‘I’m here to do some tutoring for Sir Gilbert and his family.’

‘Francis,’ said the man, returning the handshake. ‘Frederick Francis. My friends call me Freddie.’

He was in his mid-forties, Rachel would have guessed. Fit and well preserved. Slight traces of grey around the temples were really his only signs of middle age. He was not unattractive, by any means, but there was something about him, something indefinable, which made her immediately want to recoil.

‘You’re new, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘New to the family, I mean.’

‘Yes,’ said Rachel. ‘I arrived yesterday.’

‘Staying long?’

‘I’m not really sure,’ she replied, laughing. ‘That hasn’t been made clear.’

‘Ah, yes. Sir Gilbert likes to preserve the element of surprise.’

Not fully understanding this, and wanting to fill the void of silence that followed, Rachel asked: ‘So, have you been allocated your tent?’

‘Sadly, no,’ he answered. ‘I’m going back to London on this evening’s flight.’

‘Wow.’ Rachel was — not for the first time in the last two days — astonished. ‘That’s a long way to come, just for the afternoon.’

‘Well, Sir Gilbert won’t be in London again for a while, and I’ve got some things he needs to sign. They’re rather urgent.’

‘Ah. I see,’ said Rachel, although she very much didn’t. ‘You work for Sir Gilbert, then, do you?’

Freddie pretended, at least, to give this question serious thought. ‘Now that’s a tricky one. Do I work for him? Or do I work for myself? Or does he work for me?’

Rachel wasn’t interested in riddles right now. ‘What line of business are you in?’ she asked, directly.

‘Before I go,’ said Freddie, ‘I’ll give you my card.’

But he was either lying, or he forgot, and when he departed the camp that afternoon at 4.30, Mr Francis left her not with a business card but with a long, appraising look from the window of the Land Rover, and an inexplicably uneasy feeling in her gut.

*

As it happened, Rachel and the rest of the family were not long in following Mr Francis back to the airport in Johannesburg. That evening at six o’clock, Madiana and the twins arrived back from their latest safari, and Lady Gunn was more contemptuous of the guide’s endeavours than ever.

‘Gilbert, darling,’ she said, as the twins ran into the tent to change into their swimming costumes, ‘we are absolutely wasting our time here. There are no lions in this park, none at all. All we saw today were those stupid elephants again.’

‘I told you — I can provide you with most things. But not lions, I’m afraid.’

‘Then I seriously think we might as well pack up and go home.’

And the next day, that was exactly what they did. They packed up early in the morning: Madiana, Rachel and the children flew back to London, and Sir Gilbert took a plane to Singapore, although whether that was his final destination was anybody’s guess. Madiana did not seem to know or even particularly care where he was off to. This was one of the many things that puzzled Rachel, as she mulled over the trip during the eleven-hour flight home. She had much to think about on that flight: these last few days had been among the most mysterious of her life, after all. But amidst the dense tangle of her thoughts, the image that recurred to her most often, strangely enough, was a view of the camp itself: booked out for the rest of the week by Sir Gilbert and his family, but now defined, instead, by their absence: the swimming pool unused, the bar and restaurant deserted, the staff redundant, the very tents themselves standing empty and purposeless in the grey shade of the jackalberry trees.

4

When Rachel returned home, she found that a lot had been happening at her grandparents’ house. Tests had shown up a large cancerous tumour in her grandfather’s colon. He had been booked into theatre as soon as the discovery was made, and after a six-hour operation the tumour was successfully removed. But the cancer had already mestastasized to his liver, and could no longer be cured through surgery or radiotherapy or chemotherapy, the doctors said: it could only be ‘managed’. They refused to give a prognosis, but the family all knew that cancer of the liver usually comes with a life expectancy of only a few months. For the time being, Grandad would have to remain in hospital: it would take him at least two weeks to recover from the operation.

The next day, Rachel dropped her mother off at court and then drove out to Beverley by herself. As soon as she arrived, her grandmother took her in a crooked, bony embrace, weeping quietly. Afterwards, Gran made some cheese sandwiches and they had lunch together in the garden. Rachel looked at the plum tree, still bearing a few bunches of overripe fruit, and thought about the gentle, sorrowful message that had been passed on to her by the wind whispering through its branches. She thought, too, about that camp of six magnificent tents grouped around the swimming pool in the Kruger national park, and found it hard to believe that it existed, let alone that she had been there herself just a few days ago.

She hugged her grandmother tighter than ever when she said goodbye. And then, the next morning, she received another phone call from Albion Tutors.

‘You were a big hit with Sir Gilbert and his family,’ Mr Campion told her, to her surprise. ‘Lady Gunn wants to see you tomorrow. You may be looking at a more permanent post.’

So, once again, Rachel took the train down from Leeds to London. She took the Piccadilly Line to South Kensington and then, after a few minutes’ walk, found herself entering a part of the city where the houses were tall and wide, with polished steps leading up to porticoed entrances, and full-length sash windows looked out over streets which once, she imagined, would have been hushed and cloistered.

Not any more, however. The Gunns’ house was located in a broad avenue called Turngreet Road, and when Rachel walked into it she was confronted by a scene more reminiscent of a building site than a residential backwater. At least half of the houses in the street seemed to be undergoing major reconstruction. There were high, solid, impenetrable hoardings around their front gardens, all emblazoned with the logos of building firms with names like Talisman Construction, Prestige Basements and Vanguard Redesign. Instead of artisans chipping away at brickwork or giving doorframes a delicate lick of paint, there were gigantic cement mixers grinding away deafeningly, huge skips full of bricks and aggregate being transported on industrial hoists, fifty-foot cranes blocking the carriageway while they hauled their massive loads of girders and breezeblocks from one place to another. Yellow signs along the side of the road indicated a series of parking suspensions whereby residents’ bays had been blocked out for months at a time. Gingerly, Rachel picked her way through all this activity, nodding hello to the groups of men standing around at each of the sites, wearing hard hats and high-visibility jackets and holding low-voiced conversations in Eastern European languages. They returned her greetings with impassive stares.

Finally she arrived at what seemed to be the Gunns’ house: Number 13. Like the others, it had a tall hoarding around it. This one was green, and bore the logo of Grierson Basements plc. In the centre of the hoarding was a temporary front door complete with letterbox and alarm system. Rachel had been given a phone number to dial when she reached the house. While she was waiting for the call to be answered she read the warning sign on the hoarding: ‘Under the Health and Safety Act 1974 all persons entering this site must comply with all regulations under this act. All visitors must report to the site office and obtain permission to proceed on to the site or any work area. Safety signs and procedures must be observed and personal protection and safety equipment must be used at all times.’ Another sign simply said: ‘No unauthorized entry’. She began to feel that putting on her smartest work clothes may have been a mistake.

A voice at the other end of the line, with a slight foreign — perhaps Far Eastern? — accent, said: ‘Miss Wells?’, at which precise moment a pneumatic drill started up behind one of the nearby hoardings, making conversation all but impossible. ‘Yes?’ Rachel shouted into the phone, and then the voice said something indistinct and the call ended. While she was wondering what to do, and whether she was expected to dial again, the temporary green door was pulled open and the welcoming face of a housemaid appeared. Her skin was dark brown, her hair thick, black and wiry, but Rachel could not be sure of her ethnic origin.

‘Miss Wells? Please, come in. She is waiting for you.’

Following the maid, Rachel weaved her way past a toilet cubicle and a temporary site office, towards the front stairs of the house. She could not help noticing that the site was deserted and appeared to have been abandoned some time ago. Then they were up the stairs and had gained the sanctuary of the hallway, where calm, for the moment, seemed to reign.

Rachel was shown into a sitting room — or, as she supposed one should call it, a drawing room — which ran the length of the house. Bookshelves lined the walls and by the window at the far end stood a grand piano with an album of Chopin mazurkas standing open on the music stand. Everything looked pristine; almost untouched.

Madiana entered the room accompanied by a large and beautiful golden retriever, who proceeded to sniff at Rachel’s legs curiously and lick her on the hand. Madiana grabbed the dog by the collar and gave him a reproving slap.

‘All right, Mortimer, that’s enough,’ she said. The dog sat down beside her, panting but clearly chastened. Madiana greeted Rachel courteously but without warmth, and then proceeded to explain her business: she had decided to take on a live-in tutor for the twins, who were in Year 4 at the local prep school. She wanted them to do extra reading, extra maths, and to start learning French, Latin, Russian and Mandarin.

‘You will live in this house,’ she said. ‘Faustina brings the girls back from school at three thirty. They will rest and have a snack and then you will teach them from four o’clock until seven o’clock. The rest of the time is your own.’

‘What about Lucas?’

The subject of Lucas, clearly, did not interest Madiana as much as her own daughters did. ‘He’s back at school,’ she said. ‘Some weekends he will come home. When he does, you must carry on with whatever you were doing with him before. You know what you will be paid, yes? I mean, it’s all agreed with the agency.’

‘Yes,’ said Rachel.

‘So, you agree?’

It seemed that an instant decision was expected. In fact, it wasn’t a difficult one to make.

‘Yes. Of course. Thank you very much.’

‘Come with me. I’ll show you where you will live.’

Cautioning the dog to stay where he was, Madiana led Rachel into the hallway and up the main staircase. (It was one of the very few times she would ever use it.) The two girls, Grace and Sophia, lived mainly on the second floor of the house. They had a bedroom each, a shared bathroom, a study room and a large playroom equipped with everything from a table-tennis table to two PlayStation controllers and a monitor which took up most of the largest wall.

‘What a lovely room for them to play in,’ said Rachel.

‘It is not big enough,’ said Madiana, dismissively. ‘We are making them a bigger one downstairs, once these ridiculous arguments are resolved.’

She did not specify what these arguments were about or who they were with, and Rachel did not feel bold enough to ask. Doubtless all would become clear.

‘This is the door,’ said Madiana, indicating a white-panelled door in the wall of the landing, ‘that leads to your part of the house.’

Rachel was only half listening. Passing the girls’ bathroom, she noticed that the walls and ceiling were painted with gold leaf, and standing at the centre was an extraordinary item of furniture: a small roll-top bath, but not just any bath — it appeared to be a diamanté bath — studded all over with fake diamonds. At least she assumed (or rather hoped) that they were fake. In any case, she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing.

‘You are listening?’ said Madiana.

‘Yes, of course.’

Her new employer ushered her through the door. It led to another small landing, with narrow stairs leading both up and down. Madiana closed the door behind them and Rachel noticed that, on this side, the door was completely concealed by a full-length, gilt-framed mirror, and was also equipped with a keypad.

‘You need a code to open the door from this side,’ said Madiana. ‘I will give it to you later. Down there,’ she added, pointing down the stairs, ‘is the kitchen. Where you will eat. Now, follow me.’

They climbed two more flights until they had almost reached the very top of the house. There were three doors leading off the top landing.

‘Faustina and her husband sleep in here,’ said Madiana, indicating the middle door. ‘This one is the bathroom you will share with them. And this is where you will sleep.’

She led Rachel into a small but cosy bedroom with a sloping roof, fireplace and compact built-in wardrobe. There was just enough room for an armchair and a tiny desk which overlooked the back garden. Rachel peered through the window and was surprised to find how high the house was. She was surprised, too, to find that there was no garden as such, at the moment: just a continuation of the building site, a mess of mud and temporary planking with a square of tarpaulin laid out at the centre, covering what seemed to be a gigantic hole. Parked in a far corner, but still dominating the scene by virtue of its height, there stood some sort of piling rig. In the midst of this desolation, Mortimer was running around sniffing objects hopefully and cocking his leg against some of them, while being watched over by a dark-haired man smoking a cigarette. Both figures seemed very distant and small.

‘That is Jules,’ said Madiana. ‘He does the gardening, drives the cars, things like that.’

‘He’s married to Faustina?’ said Rachel.

‘Yes. You will eat your meals with them, down in the kitchen. The staff side of the house and the family side of the house are quite separate. There are doors which connect them, but the only one you will be able to use is the door with the mirror.’

‘Right,’ said Rachel. ‘I’ll remember that.’

‘Good. But you will not even use that door,’ said Madiana, ‘unless you are invited.’

5

And so Rachel’s new life began.

Her routine, at first, was simple, and her duties undemanding. She would spend a few hours every morning in her bedroom taking an online course in Russian, and the same in the afternoon for Mandarin. In this way, at least, she hoped to stay at least one day ahead of her pupils. Then at four o’clock she would go down to the mirrored door on the second floor, key in her four-digit code, pass through into the enchanted kingdom of the Gunns’ living space, and wait for the girls in their study room. Together they would work and talk for the best part of three hours, after which Grace and Sophia would go downstairs for their dinner, and Rachel would return to her bedroom. After an hour’s rest, she would descend the narrow stairs again, all the way to the lower ground floor and the staff kitchen at the back of the house. There she would eat dinner with Faustina and her husband, and afterwards either stay to watch television with them, or go back upstairs to read or go online, or sometimes smarten herself up and venture outside for the evening.

The house was extremely large, and its layout was elaborate. As Madiana had told her, the staff and family living quarters were entirely separate. There were two kitchens: a small one at the back of the house, where the staff would cook for themselves, and a large one at the front, where Faustina would also prepare meals for the children and — very occasionally — for Sir Gilbert, his wife and their guests. There was a connecting door between the two kitchens, but only Faustina knew the code that would open it. Another door from the staff kitchen led to a long cloakroom, at the end of which was a further locked door. Only Jules knew the code to this one, because it opened on to a staircase which descended to the garage in the basement. Here, in normal circumstances, the Gunns would keep their four cars: a Range Rover, a Rolls-Royce, a Lamborghini and a 1953 Bentley R-Type Continental. When one of these cars was needed, Jules was supposed to drive it on to a platform in the corner of the garage which would rise up on a hydraulic lift and emerge at ground level in front of the house. Unfortunately while the building works were in progress this was impossible, and so for the time being the cars were being stored elsewhere, and Sir Gilbert and Madiana had to make do with a Mercedes-AMG which they had bought specially to tide them over for these few months and which they kept in a small additional garage two streets away: a garage which was itself valued at just under half a million pounds.

These building works were the source of the ‘arguments’ to which Madiana had alluded when showing Rachel around the house. For some time Madiana had been insisting to her husband that their London house (one of six that they owned around the world) was not big enough to meet the family’s needs. She wished to extend: but the absurd local planning regulations dictated that they could not make the house any taller, nor could they extend it at the rear, into the back garden. The only way to go, in other words, was down.

Many other households in the area had reached similar conclusions, and so ever more extensive and elaborate basement conversions had become popular among the wealthier residents of Chelsea over the last few years. The works they entailed were exceptionally noisy and disruptive, but people more or less tolerated them, largely for the reason that, one day soon, they might want to do the same thing themselves. Serious objections were only raised, for the most part, when the works threatened to do structural damage to the neighbouring houses: and this, indeed, was what had happened in the Gunns’ case. A formal complaint had been lodged by the residents of the next house in the street (Number 15), claiming that since the Gunns had started digging out their basement, cracks had appeared in some of the supporting walls of their own property. The council had ordered that works should be suspended while the matter was resolved, and Madiana, who had grandiose plans for these subterranean floors, was beside herself with anger.

According to Jules and Faustina, however, there was also a much graver issue at stake. They told Rachel that the works had been shut down, not because of objections from the neighbours, but because of an accident on site. Details were sketchy, but it seemed that one of the builders had been at the very base of the shaft (then dug to about seventy feet) when a steel girder being lowered into place to complete the box frame had fallen from its cable and struck him.

‘That sounds nasty,’ said Rachel. ‘Was he OK?’

Jules shook his head. ‘He died. That was when Health and Safety closed the whole thing down.’

Rachel shuddered. She had a long-standing fear of underground spaces, and felt distinctly uneasy at the thought that, beneath the elegant, comfortable rooms of the Gunns’ house, a matter of mere feet from the kitchen she used every day, there yawned this pit, this fathomless void. It seemed incredible that the only thing preventing the house itself from collapsing into it was a fragile frame of steel rods and girders. She tried to block the idea from her mind.

Rachel did not see much of the girls at weekends. If Madiana and Sir Gilbert were out of the country, the twins were sometimes flown out to join them. Occasionally Jules would have to drive them to the Cotswolds, where the Gunns kept a ‘cottage’: actually a cluster of converted farm buildings, including a swimming pool and sauna complex which was itself twice as big as most people’s houses. Mortimer, the golden retriever, would sometimes go with them to the cottage, although now and again they forgot to take him. The London house was never lively at the best of times: at the weekends, when only Rachel, the housekeeper and her husband were in residence, and the building works at all the neighbouring houses were suspended, it could be chillingly silent.

*

One lunchtime, after she had been living in the Gunns’ house for a few weeks, Rachel was downstairs in the staff kitchen, watching the television. She had made herself a sandwich and was feeding scraps of cold chicken to Mortimer, who sat at her feet, tired but content after returning from his walk with Livia, the smiling, pensive Romanian dog-walker who called at the property every day to give him his exercise.

Rachel was watching the lunchtime news, without paying it much attention. Currently there was an item about the construction of Crossrail, the big new transport project designed to connect the City of London with the outermost eastern and western suburbs, entailing a number of deep excavations across the capital which were (not unlike the Gunns’ basement works) creating a lot of inconvenience for many Londoners. The report today came from Liverpool Street station, where it seemed that the construction workers had made a ghoulish discovery: twenty-five human skeletons, probably dating back to the fourteenth century and providing evidence that the current works might be taking place on the site of a burial ground for victims of the Black Death.

And then Rachel had a surprise: a nice one. The academic expert they had brought in to talk about the find was Laura Harvey, her old tutor from Oxford. She was smartly dressed in a grey pinstriped jacket over an open-necked white blouse, was wearing her hair shorter than before, and looked thoroughly glamorous and composed.

‘So, Professor Harvey,’ the newsreader was saying, ‘you think that this discovery may not just be of historical value, but worth something in monetary terms as well?’

‘Yes,’ said Laura. ‘Of course I’m not talking about the market value of the remains if people were to try and sell them. I’m saying that discoveries like this add to the sense of mystery which attaches to parts of London, and that sense of mystery is one of the things that attracts people here.’

‘Tourists, you mean.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re part of a movement, I believe, which is tasked with the job of assigning value to phenomena such as this?’

‘That’s right. As members of the Institute for Quality Valuation, we attempt to quantify things that have traditionally been thought of as unquantifiable. Feelings, in other words. A sense of awe, a sense of wonder, even fear — in fact, fear in particular. Look how popular the London Dungeon is.’

‘Monetizing Wonder was the title of your book on this subject, wasn’t it? But that was mainly a book about films.’

‘Well, London has been the setting for countless films, and the stories which filmmakers have framed around these settings are among the things which draw people here. What’s been uncovered at Liverpool Street today, for instance, is strongly reminiscent of a number of famous London films. I’m thinking of Quatermass and the Pit, from the 1960s, in which a construction crew digging a new tube line unearths a human skeleton, among other things; or Death Line, made a few years later, in which a disused Underground station turns out to be housing a colony of cannibals. It doesn’t matter whether people have actually seen these films or not: collectively, they are part of our consciousness. They tell us something important about London, which is that we’re never quite sure what lies underneath us, beneath our feet. There is always the sense that if we dig too deeply beneath London’s surface, we might uncover something sinister, something nasty. People find this a frightening idea, of course, but also rather an exciting one.’

‘Finally, Dr Harvey, would you care to put a value — a monetary value — on today’s discovery at Liverpool Street?’

‘Yes, of course. We’ve developed an algorithm to produce quick and very rough estimates for this sort of thing, taking into account all the historical, cultural and literary factors, and we estimate that the discovery of these human remains today probably adds about £1.2 million to the value of London as a whole.’

‘Fascinating stuff. Professor Laura Harvey, thank you very much. And now — how should we cope with the problem of trained jihadists returning to the UK? We take a look at Denmark, where they are experimenting with a very different approach to this question …’

6

‘It’s wonderful to see you again, Rachel,’ Laura said. ‘Thank you so much for getting back in touch.’

‘I should have done it ages ago,’ said Rachel. ‘But I wasn’t sure where you were working any more. It was such a shock, seeing you on the TV …’

‘Well, I’m a bit embarrassed about that.’

‘Why? I thought you came across incredibly well. So confident and articulate.’

‘Yes, but … this new public role I seem to be acquiring. I feel very ambivalent about it.’

She stirred her cappuccino and took a tentative sip. They were sitting in the Housman Room, the senior common room at University College, London, on a quiet Thursday morning with not many other lecturers or research students for company. It was a bright and cheerful space, with colourful modernist abstracts hanging on the walls and autumn sunlight pooling in through a glass cupola. Sinking back into one of the comfortable leather armchairs, Laura looked thoroughly at home there. She had been on the staff at UCL for two years now, her job title — Professor of Contemporary Thought — testifying to the fact that she had started to expand her academic horizons since teaching Rachel at Oxford.

‘Basically,’ she said, ‘I’ve done a deal with the devil. The devil in this case being Lord Lucrum. He was Master of our college, remember?’

‘Of course. Is he not any more?’

‘No. He left a few months ago, to spend more time with his committees. One of which, much to my amazement, he asked me to join. He’d actually read my book — or got someone to read it for him. Pretty surprising, in either case, since I never thought that a book of essays about obscure British films would interest anyone other than the occasional fanatic like my late husband. But I think it was the title that caught his fancy, more than anything else.’

‘Is this to do with that institution you mentioned in the interview …?’

‘That’s right. The Institute for Quality Valuation — of which he’s the director. Sounds pretty innocuous, doesn’t it?’

‘Is it not?’

‘It goes back,’ said Laura, ‘to the 1980s, when Henry Winshaw was chairing a Review Board on the NHS. The idea was to privatize it, essentially, although of course nobody was going to admit that straight out. But he had this one big idea, which was that quality of human life could be valued. Priced, to use the more accurate word. So that some medical interventions are more cost-effective than others. Lord Lucrum — or David Lucrum as he was called in those days — was a relatively lowly management consultant who was part of that review. He worshipped Henry Winshaw — idolized him — and nowadays people see him as some sort of spiritual heir. He’s still an adviser to the government on NHS reforms. As for this new institute, it’s part of the same move to express everything in monetary terms. They want people like me — arts and humanities people — to come on board and be part of the process.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought,’ Rachel said, choosing her words carefully, ‘you’d feel all that comfortable sitting around a table with that lot.’

‘I know what you mean, but I’m trying to see it from a different point of view. We’re dealing with people who have no notion at all that something is important unless you can put a price on it. So, rather than have them dismiss … well, human emotion, altogether, as something completely worthless, I think it’s better if someone like me comes along and tries to help them out. Makes some sort of case for the defence. So we’ve coined a new term — “hedonic value”. That might refer to, say, the feeling you get when you look at a beautiful stretch of coastline. And we try to prove that this feeling is actually worth a few thousand pounds; or, on the other hand, that a widow’s grief might come at a cost of £10,000 a year to the economy. This way, you see, at least they’ll recognize these feelings. At least they’ll acknowledge their existence.’

Rachel thought about this, and said: ‘You know what I’m starting to think? I’m starting to realize that there are people around us who look normal from the outside, but when you start to understand what makes them tick, you see that they’re not like the rest of us at all. They’re like androids, or zombies or something …’

‘Ah, yes. They walk among us …’ Laura looked up to say hello to a young man who was walking past them on his way to fetch a coffee. ‘Jamie! Are you coming to join us?’

‘Erm … sure. Would that be OK? I don’t want to interrupt.’

‘Not at all. Come on over.’

While Jamie was getting his coffee, she explained: ‘One of my PhD students. Very bright guy. And an absolute sweetheart to boot. The two of you should definitely meet.’

Rachel started to tell Laura about her new job: the sudden phone call, the bewildering transition from Leeds to a South African safari park, the absurd opulence of her new home, the Sisyphean task of ridding Lucas of his arrogance, her own difficult, developing relationship with Grace and Sophia, the Gunns’ glacially composed twin daughters. Jamie came to join them in the middle of her description and, like Laura, appeared intrigued by this insight into the otherwise unglimpsable milieu of the super-rich.

‘So, how do they treat you?’ he wanted to know. ‘Like an equal, or like a member of staff?’

Rachel hesitated. Not only was this a difficult question to answer, but she had just noticed something about Jamie: he was distractingly good-looking. ‘A bit of both, I suppose,’ she said, bringing her thoughts into focus with an effort. ‘Obviously I’m not a person they’d ever have spoken to, normally, but somehow, I don’t know, there seems to be some sort of weird … respect going on.’

‘But you probably represent something very precious to them,’ said Laura. ‘You went to Oxford. You say this woman grew up in Kazakhstan and used to be a model. So, now she finds herself trying to make her way in British society, right at the top. She’s got most of the stuff that money can buy, but you represent all sorts of other things, intangible, desirable things: tradition, culture, privilege, history. I mean, I doubt if that’s how you feel about yourself, but that’s probably how you seem to her. It’s like Lord Lucrum and his committee: she sees something that exists outside the marketplace, and the only way she knows how to react is by putting a price on it. A British education — a certain sort of British education — is one of our few remaining national assets, and like everything else we’re ready to flog it off to the richest buyer. I’ve seen plenty of that happening in my line of work over the last few years, believe me.’

‘I feel,’ Rachel said, ‘that there’s my world, and there’s their world, and the two co-exist, and are very close to each other, but you can’t really pass from one to the other.’ She smiled. ‘Unless you use the magic door, of course.’

‘What magic door?’ asked Jamie.

‘Well, that’s what I call it. It’s the only way I can get from my side of the house to theirs. It looks like a big mirror. A mirror you can pass through.’

‘Like Orphée,’ said Laura, ‘in Cocteau’s film.’

Neither Rachel nor Jamie understood the reference. Laura had to explain that in Cocteau’s reimagining of the Orpheus legend, the poet was able to make his way into the underworld by passing through a mirror which turned to liquid when he stepped into it. It struck her as typical that neither of them had seen a film made in 1950 which, until recently, had been considered famous.

‘I know what Roger would have thought about that,’ she said. ‘You don’t bother to watch these great old films because you have too much choice. In the old days you would have watched them because there was nothing else on the television and nothing else to do.’

‘How’s Harry?’ Rachel asked, reminded of Laura’s family life by this mention of her husband.

‘He’s fine,’ said Laura. ‘Doing well at his new school.’ The reply was curt: as before, she didn’t seem to want to talk or even think much about her son. She dismissed the subject quickly. ‘Anyway, if you want to hear about different worlds colliding, you should really ask Jamie where he was last weekend.’

‘Really?’ he said, giving her a pleading look. ‘Does Rachel have to hear about that? We’ve only just met.’

‘But you have to tell her what happened. It’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.’

‘It’s embarrassing.’

‘You shouldn’t be embarrassed. You come out of it very well. And if you’re lucky, she might put it in one of her stories. When I taught her at Oxford, she wrote quite a few short stories. Very good they were too.’

Rachel blushed with pleasure at the compliment. And she was full of curiosity by now, so Jamie realized that he was going to have to enlighten her, whether he liked it or not.

‘OK. So, last weekend,’ he began, still with palpable reluctance, ‘a friend of mine was getting married, and the night before we all went out on a stag night. To a lap-dancing club. Not my choice. I’d never been to one of these places before — never had to, never wanted to — so I wasn’t really prepared for the whole experience. So before I know what’s happening, this incredible woman, with a gorgeous figure, the kind of woman who’d never normally look at me, is sitting on my lap, more or less naked, with her arms around me, gyrating her hips, looking straight into my eyes. So I feel that something is … well, called for. Some sort of response. I feel that I have to say something.’

‘And what did you say?’ Rachel asked. ‘“You’re really beautiful”? “Thank you very much — here’s fifty pounds”?’

‘No,’ said Jamie. ‘I can see now that those would have been good things to say. But I asked her a question instead.’

He paused for a long time.

‘Go on.’

‘I asked her if she and the other girls … belonged to a union.’

Rachel stared at him, not convinced that she had heard correctly.

‘I mean, I was genuinely interested. I wanted to know what kind of employment rights they had, and whether they were unionized. It seemed like a good kind of conversational gambit.’

He looked down, apologetically, into the emptiness of his coffee cup. Laura waited to see Rachel’s reaction, and before long both women were laughing: helpless laughter, laughter without end. And then Jamie too. The readiness with which he joined them, was prepared to see the joke against himself, was adorable. Rachel decided there and then that she was not going to leave the Housman Club that morning without his mobile number.

7

At Euston station, Lucas turned to Rachel and held out his hand. For a moment she thought he had been about to kiss her on the cheek — they had just spent the whole day together, after all — but he went for a formal handshake instead. The delicate balance of the tutor — pupil relationship had to be preserved, she supposed.

‘Well, thank you, Rachel,’ he said. ‘That was a very … enlightening day.’

‘Enlightening?’

‘Yes. Well, I can’t really think of any other word, offhand.’

Rachel and Lucas had spent the day in Birmingham together, helping out at a food bank in Kings Norton. She’d had the idea earlier in the week, when she’d realized that Lucas would be with them for most of a ten-day half-term and had nothing much to do apart from his schoolwork. It might open his eyes, she thought, to come into direct contact with families dealing with food poverty, and it had been an easy enough thing to set up: choosing Birmingham more or less at random, as offering a sharpish contrast to the social and ethnic mix of Windsor, she had managed to arrange it all with a couple of emails.

‘What I mean is,’ he said, stammeringly, ‘— one reads about these places — one knows that they exist — but not everybody actually takes the plunge and visits them.’

‘Well, I expect all food banks are different,’ said Rachel, ‘but at least you now have a rough idea …’

‘Well … I was talking about Birmingham, actually. But yeah, food banks, too, I mean, it’s really cool to know what they’re all about, and so on.’

‘Good. Well, you mustn’t be late for your friends.’

‘No.’

‘Where are you meeting?’

‘Not far from here. Top of Centrepoint. I’ll probably grab a cab.’

‘Well, I bet they haven’t spent the whole day making up parcels of cornflakes and orange juice and hot chocolate. Don’t forget to show them the pictures. I bet they’ll be impressed.’

‘Yeah, they’ll have a right laugh, probably. I’ll do that.’

‘OK then.’

She waved goodbye and watched as his tall, loping frame was swallowed up by the crowds of commuters.

Rachel took the tube back to Turngreet Road but got out a few stops early, at Knightsbridge, wanting to walk through these quieter, emptier streets and think back on the events of the day. Try to come to terms with their strangeness. Lucas had fallen almost completely silent after their arrival at Birmingham New Street. Maybe this was down to self-preservation, because on the local train to Kings Norton, let alone at the food bank itself, his accent would immediately have attracted unwelcome attention. But Rachel was afraid there had been more to it than that. She thought again about his friends ‘having a laugh’ as they passed around the pictures of his visit, and knew that on some level he had found the whole episode not enlightening at all, but amusing. Everything from his bottle-green volunteer’s apron to the tins of fruit and vegetables stacked on the store room shelves had struck him, she now suspected, first as exotic, then somehow quaint and endearing, and finally comical. When they had been welcomed by Dawn, the centre’s cheerful manager, he’d found her Black Country accent so hard to understand that Rachel had had to translate for him. After that, to give him credit, he’d kept his head down and worked uncomplainingly, spending most of the day in the back room making up parcels without once letting slip that in his other, secret life he attended the most famous public school in the country. Now, though, having spent the day working hard, in a less than glamorous setting, without embarrassing himself or anyone around him, he had the advantage of being able to walk away from the experience without ever thinking about it again. On the train home he’d said almost nothing, just stared fixedly at his iPhone 6, lost in some group chat or solitary amusement. She hadn’t been expecting his worldview to be overturned in the space of a few hours: just hoping, perhaps, for some wondering comment, some register of shock at the discovery that, side by side with his own protected world, places like this should also need to exist. But if the thought occurred to him, he had chosen not to express it.

As for Rachel herself, she had been at the front counter, handing out the parcels themselves to downcast, monosyllabic women (they were mainly women) in return for vouchers. And that was when the strangest thing of all had happened.

‘Two-four-one!’ she had called out, and then, as she handed over the paper carrier, she realized that she knew the person who had come up to present her voucher. It was Val Doubleday, Alison’s mother.

‘Hello, Val!’ she had said. ‘It is Val, isn’t it?’ There was no sign of recognition on her part. ‘It’s me, Rachel. You know, Alison’s friend from Leeds?’

Val had looked confused: more than confused. The shock of finding someone from another city, and her distant past, in this place and in this role seemed to render her completely speechless. What should have been a joyful reunion dissolved into a scene of terrible awkwardness. Rachel had asked after Alison; had received some stilted, unconvincing reply to the effect that she was ‘doing fine’; had scribbled her email address on a piece of card and handed it over; and had explained that she was only visiting Birmingham for the day.

‘I heard you were on TV a few years ago,’ she added. ‘I’m sorry, I missed the whole thing. I’d just arrived at uni and, you know, you don’t really watch telly in the first year … Are you singing at the moment?’

Val did not answer this question. All she said, blurting out the words as quickly as she could was: ‘I’m not getting this stuff for myself. It’s my next-door neighbour — she’s old, and she can’t get out …’

‘Of course,’ Rachel said.

‘Say hi to your mother from me, won’t you?’ said Val. And then she was gone, not looking back. In fact she had not made eye contact at all during the whole encounter.

Rachel stared after her, trying to work out what had just happened. She didn’t snap out of it until Dawn came out from the store room with the latest parcel, having finally, it seemed, found a temporary chink in Lucas’s wall of silence and self-concealment.

‘I love your friend,’ she said. ‘He’s hilarious. Do you know what he called this?’ She held up a jar of decaf coffee from the top of the parcel, and said, in a deadly impression of his sardonic drawl: ‘Bit of a Mickey Mouse drink, if you ask me.’

8

If Lucas was proving difficult to change, the twin daughters, Grace and Sophia, presented an equal challenge. Rachel did not know what to make of them at all. They were very intelligent, she could see that. Very determined, too. They were picking up their new languages quickly; so quickly, that Rachel herself could barely keep up with them. Their prep school had small class sizes, and there were regular, weekly tests in most subjects. The twins took careful notice of the results and would waste no time in telling her whether they had come first, second or third in the rankings. (They were rarely any lower than that.) They played elaborate games on their PlayStations and watched American comedy shows on their iPads, often following the dialogue with concentration rather than enjoyment. Rachel would read to them every night at the end of their lessons but she found it difficult to choose stories that would engage them, and would often be surprised by their responses. Once she tried reading them one of her favourite stories, H. G. Wells’s ‘The Door in the Wall’. How could they fail to be moved, she thought, by this tale of a young boy who, at the age of five, finds a door in the wall of an ordinary London street, and discovers that it leads to a magical garden: a door he will never be able to locate again, a garden he will never revisit, despite a lifetime of efforts and longings? She liked to ask questions as she went along, to make sure that they understood what they were hearing: and when the little boy was first expelled from the garden, was sent back into the ‘grey world’ of London again, and admitted, years later, that ‘as I realized the fullness of what had happened to me, I gave way to quite ungovernable grief’, she said to them: ‘So — why do you think he’s crying?’

Sophia’s answer was hard to forget. ‘Because he’s weak,’ she said, calmly.

Were Sir Gilbert and Madiana satisfied with the progress she was making with their children? It was hard to tell. For one thing, she could never be entirely sure when they were even at home: if, indeed, their London residence was their ‘home’ in any meaningful sense. On her side of the house, there were CCTV cameras everywhere: not in her bedroom, thankfully, and not in the bathroom as far as she could tell, but certainly in the kitchen, and all the stairways and landings. The images from these cameras could be streamed to Sir Gilbert’s or Madiana’s smartphones and tablets wherever they were in the world, so they always knew when Rachel was in the house and when she had gone out. But the arrangement was not reciprocal. Her employers kept her informed about their own movements on a need-to-know basis, which meant, in practice, that Rachel had no way of knowing where they were at all. When they were at home, they made very little noise, and the presence of lights in the windows meant nothing, since for security reasons the lights were programmed to come on automatically at random, whether the house was occupied or not.

One evening in late November, then, it was a surprise for Rachel to catch a glimpse of Sir Gilbert as she left the house by the back door (as always) and picked her way through the abandoned builders’ materials on her way to the front entrance and a date with Jamie. Her employer was standing between the Grecian columns at the top of the steps, saying goodbye to another man and shaking his hand. As the door was closed and the man descended the steps to catch up with her, she saw that it was Frederick Francis.

‘Well, hello,’ he said, stretching the word again in that annoyingly flirtatious way. They hadn’t seen each other since the trip to the Kruger national park.

‘Hello, Frederick,’ said Rachel, stopping short of using the friendly abbreviation.

‘Something of a mess, isn’t it?’ he said, surveying the jumble of ladders, drills, masonry, ironware and cement mixers that the builders had left behind.

‘I find I’m getting used to it,’ said Rachel, pushing the temporary door open and stepping out into the street through the hoarding.

‘Of course,’ said Freddie, hurrying to keep up with her, ‘you’ve become quite the fixture around here, I understand.’

‘Well, it was nice seeing you again,’ she said, preparing to head off down the street.

‘Wait a minute. Where are you going?’ said Freddie.

‘I’ve got a date.’

‘Heading for the West End?’

‘Soho.’

‘Well, Jules is going to drive me that way. We can give you a lift.’

‘I’d rather not.’

‘Oh, come on. It’s a free ride. Don’t be so puritanical.’

In truth, Rachel needed to save the money, even if it was only a few pounds on her Oyster card. She accepted the lift, and settled with an involuntary sigh of pleasure into the deeply cushioned leather seat at the rear of the Mercedes. The leather was heated, she could not help noticing, a feature which itself was extremely welcome on this chilly winter night.

‘I mustn’t get too comfortable, must I?’ she said. ‘It’d be a mistake to get used to this level of luxury.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Freddie, ‘I think it would be very good for you to get used to it. Everyone should experience a ride in a car like this at least once. Then they’d have something to aspire to.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Rachel.

She stared out of the window as the car purred north, through The Boltons and across the Brompton Road. She was surprised by how clearly she could see: from the outside, the window had looked completely opaque.

‘And who’s the lucky man you’re meeting tonight?’ Freddie asked.

‘Do you come to the house often?’ Rachel said, not shifting her gaze from the passing houses. ‘Only I’ve never seen you there before.’

‘I’m very discreet,’ said Freddie. ‘Now you see me, now you don’t.’ When this remark failed to have any effect, he added: ‘So … you’re curious about me. I’m flattered.’

‘Don’t be. This job gives me a lot of time to myself. I’ve got to think about something.’

Discouraged by this response, Freddie fell silent.

‘I did Google you, though,’ said Rachel, as flatly as she could.

‘Really? And what did you find?’

‘Mostly, stuff about a British film director. As for you — well, very little, actually.’

‘Just as it should be.’

‘I found the name of the firm you work for. But I didn’t find out much about what you do.’

‘It’s not really in the public domain.’

‘I did notice something, though. It said you used to work for a private bank called Stewards’. And so did Sir Gilbert, according to Wikipedia.’

‘Well, well. We have a real cyber-detective in our midst. That’s how we met, of course. On the trading floor of Stewards’. Back in the late eighties.’ He sighed. ‘Ah, happy times.’ The car was paused at traffic lights, waiting to turn left into the Cromwell Road. Jules was listening to Magic FM, turned down to an unobtrusive volume. ‘The boss of Stewards’ in those days was a man called Thomas Winshaw. A legendary figure. He treated the traders as if we were his favourite sons. The sons he never had. Gil was the outstanding one, of course. I was good, but I didn’t have his flair, his nerves of steel. Currency trading was his thing. His deals started getting bolder and bolder — I mean, if we’d stopped to think about it (which we never did), he was really putting the whole of the bank’s funds at serious risk, sometimes — but Thomas trusted him, he let him get on with it, and then in 1992 he put a huge bet — and I mean a really, really huge one — on the pound crashing out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Which is what happened, of course. It was called Black Wednesday, because it was a bad day, for most people, a terrible day. But not for Gilbert. My God, how we all celebrated that night! We must have spent about thirty grand on champagne alone. We drank one toast after another to Thomas, who of course was no longer with us, by then. He had … passed on, the year before, in horrible circumstances. But that hadn’t stopped us. It had just made us more reckless than ever, in fact: more determined.

‘After a couple more years,’ said Freddie, as the car eased its way through the Knightsbridge traffic, gliding past slower, less powerful vehicles with no apparent effort, ‘we were both getting tired of the money markets. You burn out, in that world, pretty quickly. Gilbert formed Gunnery Holdings, and started buying and selling companies. He moved into property development. Started expanding, diversifying. He had a big fortune to play with, by now, a massive fortune. I was still at Stewards’, stagnating a bit, getting more and more restless. And one night I met him for a drink, at some private members’ club. We got pretty pissed, talked about this and that. And I realized that, even though things were going so well for him, he wasn’t happy.’

‘Perhaps he was developing a conscience,’ said Rachel.

Freddie smiled. ‘Guess again.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Rachel. ‘What could possibly have been making him unhappy?’

If there was any irony underpinning the question, Freddie missed it. ‘Well, it was quite simple. He felt that he was paying too much tax.’

Rachel snorted.

‘Oh, it shouldn’t surprise you. It doesn’t matter how generous the government is, however much they lower the top rate. If you’re bringing home ten million a year, you’re writing an annual cheque to the Inland Revenue for four million pounds. It’s not a question of how rich you are. That feels like a lot of money. It hurts.’

‘My heart bleeds for him,’ said Rachel.

‘It wasn’t just him. I realized that plenty of people in his position — not that there were many Brits in London who were as wealthy as Gilbert, by this stage — were feeling the same way. So I decided that was where the future lay. My future, anyway.’

‘Tax avoidance? Charming.’

‘Tax management, is what I prefer to call it.’

‘I’m sure you do. So where do you go to learn that, then? Do they send you on a course?’

‘Well, I took what I thought to be the simplest and most obvious route. I went to work with HMRC for a while.’

‘You became a tax inspector?’

‘It seemed to be the best way of learning the ins and outs of the system. You’d be surprised, nowadays, how many tax inspectors leave the Revenue and go straight into the City to set themselves up as independent advisers. But I was one of the first. I blazed the trail.’

‘Your mother must be very proud.’

Freddie was starting to tire of Rachel’s sarcasm. ‘This chap you’re meeting tonight,’ he said. ‘What does he do?’

‘He’s a postgrad,’ said Rachel. ‘He’s writing a thesis on The Invisible Man.’ She noticed Freddie’s blank look. ‘H. G. Wells.’

‘A whole thesis,’ he said, incredulously, ‘on one book?’

‘He’s using invisibility as a metaphor,’ said Rachel, not sure why she was bothering to explain any of this, ‘to talk about politics. How people become invisible, when the system loses sight of them.’

‘Sounds as though he’s spotted a real gap in the market there.’

‘Not everybody thinks about “the market” when they decide what to do with their lives.’ She leaned forward and addressed the chauffeur. ‘Could you let me out here please, Jules?’

The car pulled over and came to a noiseless halt.

‘Well, let me know when he makes his first million,’ said Freddie. ‘I’ll help minimize his tax liability.’

‘Lovely talking to you,’ said Rachel, and then she said thank you and goodbye to Jules before stepping out into the crowds of tourists clogging up Shaftesbury Avenue; relieved to find herself surrounded, once again, by people she felt she could probably understand.

9

‘So, you had a nice time last night, with your boyfriend?’ said Livia.

‘Very nice, thank you,’ said Rachel, smiling, but she did not divulge any more information. She didn’t feel that she knew Livia well enough yet.

This was their third walk together, and their longest. Livia had three dogs today: Mortimer, plus a pair of Airedale terriers she collected from a flat in a mansion block off Gloucester Road. They took the dogs to Hyde Park, let them off the lead near the Round Pond and then, when they had run themselves into a state of near-exhaustion, strolled over to the Serpentine Gallery. Now they were crossing West Carriage Drive and heading down towards the café. It was a bright and sunny but fiercely cold morning in early December. It seemed the only people in the park that day were women walking their dogs: they’d already come across Jane, the Queen of dog-walkers, who sometimes walked as many as ten at a time. Her dogs had been restless and unruly this morning, so they’d not had much time to stop and talk. Now Mortimer and the Airedales were looking tired and ready for a bowl of water.

Rachel was starting to like Livia very much. By training she was a musician. She played in a string quartet which gave occasional London recitals but of course she did not earn anything from this, and walking dogs provided the bulk of her meagre income. Her instrument was the cello and, to Rachel’s ears, her voice itself was reminiscent of a cello, with something of its sonorous depth and melancholy richness. She spoke slowly and carefully, with a thick Romanian accent which sometimes made her words hard to understand.

‘You remember that woman I told you about?’ she said, when they were sitting inside the café, in the warmth, with expensive lattes in front of them. ‘The one who has the same kind of cancer as your grandfather?’

‘Yes,’ said Rachel. ‘I remember. You said she’d come out of hospital and was doing really well.’

‘That’s right. Well, last week she asked me to walk her dog again. She has a wonderful Afghan hound, called William. She lives in a house between the Kings Road and the river. A beautiful part of Chelsea. The house is only small but I think it is worth several million pounds. My client, whose name is Hermione, is a member of the aristocracy, I think. She is some sort of duchess or baroness or something — I don’t really understand what all these titles mean in this country. Anyway, as I said to you last time, she was told almost two years ago that she had cancer of the liver and would only live for a few months. Just like your grandfather has been told. They didn’t want to give her chemotherapy or radiotherapy or anything like that. But when she went into hospital she was taken to see a doctor who said there were new drugs which could help with this condition. Not to cure it, just to make it easier to bear. So last week I asked her what these drugs were called and she told me that they were giving her one called cetuximab. And she said it had helped her a lot. It had removed many of the symptoms and there had not been many side effects. Of course, she still has the cancer, there’s nothing she can do about that, but she was diagnosed two years ago now and since then her quality of life has been good, very good. She’s just come back from visiting friends in Paris and now she’s going to spend Christmas in Rome with her daughter.’

‘That sounds amazing,’ said Rachel.

‘Are you seeing your grandfather soon?’

‘Yes, I’ll be seeing him at Christmas. I’m not sure whether he’ll be at home or in hospital. But I’ll definitely be seeing him.’

‘Then maybe you can ask his doctor if he can give him some of these drugs.’

‘Yes, I will,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s got to be worth a try, hasn’t it?’

10

Grace and Sophia’s school term came to an end two weeks before Christmas. At around the same time, Lucas returned from Eton, reporting that his interview at Oxford had been a great success. (He would find out, in the New Year, that he had won a place at Magdalen College, Oxford, and by way of thanks would present Rachel with an expensive, linen-covered notebook from a stationer’s in Venice.) Madiana told Rachel that her services would probably not be required, now, until the beginning of January, and she was free to go home.

Her grandfather had been moved to a hospice on the outskirts of Beverley. It was a functional, 1970s redbrick building, surrounded by a couple of acres of lawn which were dusted with patchy snow on the afternoon that Rachel made her first visit. Her mother and grandmother were with her. They had stopped off at the local supermarket to buy some packets of fruit salad, since Gran was concerned that Grandad was not getting enough fruit. As their car pulled into the crowded car park, in the middle of the afternoon, the December light was already beginning to fade. The thin, half-hearted snow was turning to sleet. Rachel took her grandmother’s arm, feeling the sharp boniness of her elbow even through her thick tweed coat, and supported her as she shuffled slowly and carefully across the icy asphalt. It took a long time to get from the car to the entrance, with its glowing yellow light and promise of warmth: long enough for Rachel to reflect on the desperate sadness of the occasion, but also — again — its sense of inevitability. She remembered the whisper she had heard amidst the branches of the plum tree a few months earlier.

As for Grandad’s appearance, Rachel had been expecting the worst, and she found it. He was sitting up in bed, in a ward with five other patients. He was the one, without doubt, who looked most seriously ill. He had lost so much weight that his collar-and breastbones stood out starkly where his pyjama jacket lay open. His skin had yellowed horribly. He was attached to a subcutaneous drip and the smile of recognition when he saw them enter the ward was faint and effortful. Almost as soon as they pulled up their chairs and sat around the bed, the listless gaze returned to his eyes. His throat was parched and conversation seemed to sap his energy. His hand kept straying to the right-hand side of his stomach, which he would touch involuntarily even though it made him wince in pain.

Their visit lasted a slow, agonizing thirty minutes. After that it was clear that all he wanted to do was sleep.

Out in the car park, darkness had already descended and the sleet had turned to rain. They had to pay three pounds to get out through the automatic barrier.

‘I can remember when parking in hospital car parks was free,’ was all that Gran said. It was all that any of them said.

*

Rachel and her mother decided to spend Christmas in Beverley. Gran did not want to come to Leeds: she wanted to stay as near to the hospice as possible, and to visit Grandad every day, however little pleasure he seemed to derive from it. Christmas day was quiet, just the three of them. Rachel’s brother Nick was abroad somewhere: Copenhagen, they thought, with his current girlfriend, who was apparently Danish. On Christmas afternoon they visited Grandad in his ward and took him a box of chocolates and more fruit. He said that he didn’t want either. They gave the chocolates to the ward sister, who put them with two other, similar boxes beneath the Christmas tree in the entrance hall. The lights on the tree winked on and off fitfully, and the nurse behind the reception desk had brought in a CD player which played a party disc of carols and Christmas pop songs from a time before Rachel was born. The place had never seemed more cheerless.

This time, being in her grandparents’ house was proving a strange experience for Rachel. She could not believe how small it seemed. At the Gunns’ house in Turngreet Road, she had grown accustomed to high ceilings and airy, spacious rooms. Now she felt like Gulliver returning from Brobdingnag and trying to get used to normal human proportions again. The days seemed absurdly short. Darkness would have enveloped the garden by three thirty and at that point, having paid their daily visit to the hospice, they would draw the curtains, have a quick tea of eggs or beans or sardines on toast, then try to find something distracting to watch on the television. The Gunns, Rachel believed, were in the Caribbean somewhere. She imagined Grace and Sophia splashing and laughing in a turquoise lagoon while Madiana lay on a sunbed beneath the shade of a coconut tree, sipping cocktails.

She sent regular texts to Jamie. He was with his parents in Somerset. Livia had gone back to Bucharest. The days passed slowly, the hours dragged. They allowed New Year’s Eve to pass without notice, let alone celebration.

It took more than two weeks to arrange a meeting with her grandfather’s oncologist. Finally she was able to see him on the morning of the first Monday of January. He was a brusque, not to say inscrutable, consultant in his early forties: he received her not unkindly, but without letting her feel that the meeting was anything other than an unpleasant duty. He knew all about the drug she was talking about, and the first thing he said to her was:

‘Of course you know that cetuximab is an extremely expensive therapy.’

For some reason this aspect of the question had not occurred to Rachel.

‘Is it not available on the NHS, then?’

‘In certain circumstances it is, yes. But we’d have to apply for it through the Cancer Drugs Fund.’

‘Can you do that?’

‘I’m not sure I could make out a very strong case in your grandfather’s circumstances.’

‘Well, how much money are we talking about?’

The doctor consulted some notes on his desk. ‘Cetuximab is reckoned to give an ICER of £121,367 per QALY gained.’

‘Can you repeat that in English, please?’ Rachel said, after a shocked pause.

‘An ICER,’ said the doctor, ‘is the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of a therapy. A QALY is a quality-adjusted life-year. A service like the NHS has to keep a very close eye on its costs. To put it bluntly, not every year of human life is valued as highly as every other. You have to take quality of life into account. Whatever therapy is given to him, I’m afraid your grandfather will have a low quality of life from now on.’

‘How do you work that out?’ asked Rachel.

‘Well, he’ll be bedridden, for instance.’

‘So?’

‘And he’s old.’

‘So’s my friend. The lady I know who’s taking the drug. What difference does that make?’

‘Do you know this person well?’

‘No,’ said Rachel, and then felt she had to admit: ‘I don’t know her at all, in fact. I know the person who walks her dog for her.’

‘Ah. Is she quite well-off, by any chance?’

‘Yes, she is. So what?’

‘Well, it’s possible that she paid for the treatment herself, that’s all.’ He did his best to give her an encouraging smile. ‘Look, I’ll put in the application. Of course, it will take a few weeks. These things always do. But we’ll see what gives.’

11

When she returned to Chelsea in the New Year, Rachel found that the house in Turngreet Road was much changed. Work on the basement conversion had been resumed, and the site both to the front and rear of the house was full of noise and activity.

Noise in particular. The piling rig in what used to be the back garden was working again, and all day long Rachel had to listen to its ceaseless, reverberant boom-boom-boom. She could even feel the ground shake with every impact. Also, from the window of her bedroom she now had a view of the pit, which lay open to the world (or at least to the neighbouring houses) like an inflamed, gaping wound in the landscape. It was, to her eyes, unthinkably deep. As well as a number of ladders fixed to its sides, there was an industrial hoist with a steel cage to take men and equipment down into the abyss and back up again. Miniature diggers had been lowered into the pit as well, and were presumably beavering away down there, with the spoil being carried back up along a huge conveyor, then along the belt through the front garden and out into the skips waiting in the street.

From the hoardings at the front of the house, Rachel learned that the building contractor had changed: Grierson Basements had been replaced by Nation Lloyd Sunken Interiors. The crew was now Romanian instead of Polish. The site manager, Dumitru, was a taciturn figure who nodded politely at Rachel whenever their paths crossed but otherwise had nothing to say to her. Like everybody else involved with the project, he wore a permanently anxious expression. Nobody, however, looked more anxious than the new project manager, Tony Blake, who spent most of every day locked up in his temporary site office, poring over the plans while still wearing his hard hat, occasionally emerging to have a nervous, conspiratorial word with Dumitru or to ring the front door bell in the hope of a meeting with Madiana to clarify some new element in her ever-changing, ever-expanding plans.

Despite the stress and inconvenience the works were causing her and everyone in the vicinity, Rachel could not help feeling sorry for Mr Blake. On the rare occasions he emerged from his office, he always looked so harassed, so terrified: she was constantly afraid that he was on the verge of having a nervous breakdown. One morning when she came back from the shops she found him at the front of the house, pacing up and down between the hoarding and the front steps and visibly shaking.

‘Would you like me to get you a cup of tea, Mr Blake?’ she asked him.

He took his hands away from his ears, which they had been covering in an attempt to block out the relentless noise of the piledriver.

‘Hm? What?’

‘You seem a bit … distressed. I wondered if you wanted a cup of tea.’

‘Tea? No, thank you. I’m fine. Absolutely fine.’

He did not look fine. His face was grey and his hands would not stop shaking.

‘I think I’ll get you one anyway,’ said Rachel. ‘A nice strong cup of tea with plenty of sugar.’

He said nothing in reply to this, but Rachel went to the staff kitchen to make the tea and then found, when she came back to offer it to him, that Mr Blake had returned to his office. He had a plywood desk in there, covered in architects’ drawings which had been annotated and scribbled over repeatedly in different-coloured inks. They, like everything else in the office, appeared to be in a state of total disarray.

‘Yes?’ he said, looking up in confusion when she came in.

‘I said I’d bring you some tea.’

‘Oh, thank you … Rachel, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, look, if you’ve come to complain about the noise, there’s nothing I can do. You can’t dig a hole this size in complete silence, you know.’

‘I’m not here to complain about the noise. I brought you some tea because I thought you looked a bit upset.’

She cleared a space for the mug on his desk, and set it down gently. There were two seats in the tiny office, but he didn’t ask her to sit down.

‘You … work for her, don’t you?’ he said, without touching the tea.

‘Yes.’

‘Is she …’ He swallowed. ‘Is she completely insane, do you think?’

This was the last question Rachel had been expecting to hear. ‘Lady Gunn, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘What makes you say that?’

At last he noticed the mug, picked it up, took a tentative sip and then a longer one.

‘I’ve worked on more than fifty basement conversions,’ he said. ‘More than fifty. All over London. But nobody has ever proposed … anything like this. Do you know —’ He looked at her directly, urgently. ‘— Do you know how deep we’re going?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Rachel. ‘It does seem a pretty big hole.’

‘Pretty big?’ he repeated. ‘Pretty big? She wants one hundred and fifty feet. That’s deeper than most tube stations.’

‘Is that … even possible? Wouldn’t you hit the water table at some point? Wouldn’t everything start flooding?’

‘Oh, that happened ages ago. That’s taken care of. They’ve installed three massive pumps. They’ll be running twenty-four hours a day. You see, anything’s possible, in fact. That’s precisely the problem.’ He picked up the mug and took another sip, staring sightlessly ahead of him. ‘The people we took this over from quit, you know. They couldn’t stand it. And a man died. Do you hear that? A man died.’

‘Yes,’ said Rachel. ‘I heard.’

‘She doesn’t care. It hasn’t made any difference at all.’

‘A hundred and fifty feet is how many floors?’

‘It depends how high you make them, of course. And she keeps changing her mind about that, but at the current count, there are eleven.’

‘Eleven? What does she want to do with them all?’

‘That keeps changing as well. She’s given me a new set of instructions just now. About ten minutes ago. Here, why don’t you have a look? You should understand the kind of person we’re dealing with.’

Rachel sat down, finally, and drew her seat closer to Mr Blake’s desk. He scrambled around among the papers in front of him, and at last found the one he was looking for. It showed the excavation as a tall column, divided into eleven separate cross sections, each one numbered and labelled.

‘Here’s the first floor,’ he said. ‘That’s where they keep the cars, as you know. And here’s floor number two, which is going to be the children’s playroom, with a full-size bowling alley. Underneath that is the cinema. Then the gymnasium. And then we have the pièce de résistance — the swimming pool. Which is going to take up the next three floors.’

‘Three floors? Why three?’

‘Because she wants a diving board. A high one. And palm trees. Palm trees!’ He began to laugh, almost hysterical. ‘We’re going to have to get palm trees in there.’ Soon he had started shaking again, but with a few more sips of tea he managed to compose himself, and then pointed at the next level. ‘So now we’re down to level eight, which is the wine cellar. Temperature-controlled, of course. Level nine is the vault. A secure vault. You’re going to need to take a special lift to get to that one, the normal lift won’t be stopping there. Level ten — well, lucky you, that’s where you lot are going to be living. That’s the staff quarters.’

‘You mean we won’t be living in the house any more?’

‘Not above ground, no. You’d better forget about natural daylight, because you won’t be seeing much of that when this job’s finished.’

‘OK,’ said Rachel. ‘And what about this one?’ She pointed at the lowest level on the drawing. ‘Number Eleven. What’s going there?’

‘Number Eleven?’ He laughed. ‘That’s the one she told me about this morning. Number Eleven is new. She’s only just asked for it.’

‘So — what’s it for?’

‘Nothing. She can’t think of anything that she wants it for.’

Rachel frowned. ‘So why are you digging it? Why does she want it?’

‘She wants it,’ said Mr Blake, ‘because she can have it. Because she can afford it. And because … I don’t know — because no one else has an eleventh floor in their basement? Or she’s just heard about somebody who has ten and she wants to go one better? Who knows? She’s mad. These people are all barking mad.’ He took one final look at the drawing, and pointed again at level Number 11 with an unsteady finger. ‘And this is the proof.’

12

From: Val Doubleday

To: Rachel Wells

Subject:

23/01/2015 21:55

Dear Rachel

I’ve been meaning to write ever since I saw you up here a couple of months ago. Very difficult, though, to say what I have to say.

Anyway, I won’t mess around. I would have liked to say it was lovely to see you but, as I’m sure you noticed, I was far too embarrassed to feel that. In fact I will be brutally honest and say that I felt totally humiliated. As you clearly realized, I was not collecting food for my elderly next-door neighbour at all. I don’t have an elderly next-door neighbour. I was collecting it for myself.

Yes, I was on the television a few years ago. I took part in a dreadful reality show but I soon got through the money they paid me. Most of it was spent paying off debts and then I stupidly used the rest to pay for expensive studio time to record demos which no one wanted to listen to and got me nowhere. I was working in a library for a while but then the hours went down further and further until they let me go altogether. (‘Let me go’ is good, isn’t it. They’ve even got me speaking like them.) For a while after the TV thing I was diagnosed with PTSD, which entitled me to some sick pay, but apart from that I’ve just been living on jobseeker’s allowance and Council Tax support. It’s been tough, especially this winter when I’ve hardly let myself put the heating on, but this was the first time I’d ever been to a food bank. I never thought I’d find myself asking a charity for free food. Thanks to you it will be the last.

Anyway, I didn’t want to tell you about me I wanted to tell you about Alison. I said she was ‘doing fine’ but that was another lie. In fact ‘doing time’ would be more accurate. (Sorry for the rotten joke. Sometimes I think you have to laugh just because there’s no alternative.) She’s in Eastwood Park prison in Gloucestershire doing twenty-six weeks for benefit fraud. They say twenty-six but really it’s thirteen, which means she’ll be out in a few weeks now. I won’t tell you the whole story but basically she was stitched up by this bitch of a journalist called Josephine Winshaw-Eaves, who wrote a horrible, vicious article about her. (Link below.) It happened more than a year ago and it’s been a total nightmare, the whole thing. When I ran into you again she was just about to start her sentence. Of course I told her that I’d seen you and she made me swear that I wouldn’t say what had happened but as of last week I think she’s changed her mind and if you felt like visiting her I think she’d like that. You can book a visit online and I’ll give you the link at the end of this email too, but I expect you’re probably very busy with one thing and another.

Well, Rachel, you were looking well I must say — Oxford must have agreed with you — but I still don’t really understand what you were doing working in that place. Maybe I’ll find out if this means that we’re going to be back in touch again from now on. It would be nice to see your mum again. I often think of that crazy trip we took to Corfu together — ten years ago, was it? Happy times.

Love from

Val

*

THE ART OF DECEPTION BLACK, DISABLED LESBIAN ON BENEFITS IS ACTUALLY BLACK, DISABLED LESBIAN BENEFITS CHEAT by Josephine Winshaw-Eaves

Alison Doubleday is the archetypal paragon of modern entitlement. The kind of person the British left-liberal establishment cannot do enough to help.

After experiencing problems with her left leg as a teenager, she had a new, state-of-the-art one fitted by dedicated NHS staff at a hospital in Birmingham — despite only having lived there for a few weeks.

The minute she became eligible for Disability Living Allowance she signed on, and has been receiving it ever since. That’s in addition to the Housing Benefit she receives for the bijou three-bedroom house she shares with her lesbian lover Selena in Birmingham’s fashionable Acocks Green.

Neither of them goes out to work. Both of them claim Jobseeker’s Allowance. And yet Alison already has a job — an extremely lucrative one.

As a self-styled ‘artist’ she has created a studio in one of her bedrooms at home. Here she creates her so-called ‘political’ portraits of homeless people.

She makes them sit for hours in poses reminiscent of the great paintings of European monarchs by the likes of Titian and Van Dyck.

‘In my pictures, I try to give these dispossessed people the dignity and grandeur of the Kings and Queens of old,’ she says.

Needless to say, while other talented artists — whose work does not press the same political buttons — languish in obscurity, Alison’s heavily ideological portraits are much sought after by London’s chaterati.

At a private show of her work in Hoxton’s fashionable Recktall Brown Gallery last month, her pictures went on sale with a price tag of up to £20,000. Many were snapped up by the adoring crowd of champagne socialists and North London luvvies.

And what percentage of the profits did our crusading artist declare to the authorities, so that it could be ploughed back into REAL assistance for Britain’s sick and homeless?

That’s right — a big, fat zero!

Alison — the daughter of failed singer and washed-up ‘reality’ TV star Val Doubleday — was not surprisingly unavailable for comment today when we tried to contact her.

13

Faustina and Jules were from Majuro, the most populous of the Marshall Islands, a small group of coral atolls lying just north of the Equator in the Pacific Ocean. They had been working for the Gunns for a little under two years.

They were reserved, friendly and uncomplaining. If the lifestyle of Sir Gilbert, Madiana and their family seemed unusual to them, they did not comment upon it. The care they lavished on their respective charges was exemplary: Faustina made sure that the twins were clean and well presented at all times, and replenished at regular intervals; meanwhile, Jules performed exactly the same function for the cars. They rarely went out to sample the diversions that London might have offered them; all their energies were bent upon saving as much money as possible out of their earnings. In the evenings they would sit in the kitchen watching television, trying to decode the niceties of British culture from the hints that the programmes let fall. Like Rachel, like the rest of the country — like the rest of the world, it sometimes appeared — they were fascinated in particular by Downton Abbey, ITV’s big-budget soap opera following the changing fortunes of the Crawley family in post-Edwardian England. Faustina and Jules never missed an episode, and once a week would surrender themselves to the show’s high production values and its quiet, insistent, endlessly reassuring message. At the heart of this message, it seemed, was the absolute necessity of the existence of both a master and a servant class. It was understood that the master class, in particular, would always conduct itself with decency and generosity; and that although the hierarchy dividing one class from another was absolute, fellow-feeling and respectful, amicable contact between the two were not unknown. Every Sunday evening, Faustina and Jules would retire to bed having been reminded that this was the natural and indeed inevitable order of things, as much in the London of 2015 as in the troubled years between the two world wars. Whether they ever remarked upon the absence of such fellow-feeling and amicable contact in their own relationship with Sir Gilbert and Madiana, Rachel could not say.

At night, when the television was turned off, the house fell silent. In fact Rachel soon came to realize that this part of London was defined by its extremes of silence and noise. During the daytime the noise pollution from building works was overwhelming, whereas at night a profound and eerie stillness settled upon the whole area. Most of these houses had been bought as investments: there was rarely anyone living in them, and after dark, the quietness and emptiness of the streets was unsettling. One of the things that had most impressed Rachel about the rich, since she had started to know them, was their ability to disappear. She mentioned this to Jamie once, when discussing his thesis on ‘invisible people’ in the new age of austerity. ‘But you shouldn’t just be writing about poor people,’ she told him. ‘The rich can make themselves invisible too.’

Rachel and Jamie saw each other two or three times a week: the days varied, but Sunday was a constant. On Sundays they would meet for a late breakfast or early lunch, and then take in a gallery or museum or film screening at a Curzon cinema or the BFI. Rachel felt strongly attracted to Jamie, but he was very absorbed in his work, and for her own part, she still did not feel quite ready for a full-blown relationship: her experiences in the last few months had made her realize how much she still had to learn, not just about the world but about herself. And so, for the time being, they were taking things slowly.

It was late one Sunday morning in January, when she was getting ready to meet him at a pub in Little Venice, that Rachel’s mobile rang and she saw Madiana’s name on the incoming call screen.

‘Rachel?’ said that flat, imperious voice. ‘The girls need you. You have to come at once.’

‘Erm, sure …’ said Rachel, her heart sinking. ‘What’s it about?’

‘You didn’t tell me that the girls have a maths exam tomorrow morning.’

‘Well, it’s only a little test, really, not an exam.’

‘But they don’t understand these equations at all. You’re going to have to come and explain them.’

‘OK.’ Doubtless this would mean a trip up the M40 to ‘the cottage’. ‘Where are you, where do you want me to come?’

It seemed that Madiana, Gilbert and the twins were not at the cottage this weekend, however. They were in Lausanne.

She was there in less than three hours. Jules drove her to the helipad in Battersea: she texted Jamie on the way to say that she wouldn’t be able to see him that day after all. From there, a helicopter took her to a private airfield just outside Oxford, where a LearJet was waiting to carry her to Switzerland.

It was her first time in Sir Gilbert’s private plane (or anybody’s, for that matter). The flight was, as she might have expected, intensely pleasurable. She helped herself to a chicken caesar salad from the galley kitchen and washed it down with a cold bottle of Peroni. She stretched out in one of the wide, yielding, smoothly upholstered club seats and passed the time flicking through pristine copies of Vogue and Tatler. She remembered what Frederick Francis had said when they rode towards Soho in the Mercedes together: ‘Everyone should experience a ride in a car like this at least once. Then they’d have something to aspire to.’ She could see his point. One of these days — perhaps sooner rather than later — she was going to part company with the Gunns, and after that she would never know luxury like this again. Coming down to earth would be difficult.

The eighty-minute flight went by all too quickly. They landed just a couple of miles from the city centre at another small airfield. A driver was waiting to pick her up and take her to the Beau-Rivage Palace, where Madiana and the rest of the family were having lunch. Their party was occupying two tables: a children’s table, where Grace and Sophia were joined by two boys and a girl of similar age, and an adults’ table, where Sir Gilbert and Lady Gunn sat with another couple, a man Rachel did not recognize, and the ubiquitous Frederick Francis himself, who gave her a little conspiratorial wave (which she ignored) as a waiter led her towards them. Both tables had a view across the empty hotel terrace towards Lake Geneva. In the furnishings and the understated conversation of the other diners there was an atmosphere of cold, clinical elegance.

‘Rachel, how good of you to join us,’ said Madiana, half rising from her seat to shake her hand. ‘You’re sitting with the children. Order whatever you want from the menu. All their books are ready for you. See if you can make sense of these ridiculous equations.’

Thereby dismissed from the main table, Rachel took her seat next to the twins and looked quickly through the menu. She had noticed that the restaurant boasted two Michelin stars, but instead of langoustine à la plancha or Challans duck with beetroot confit, all of the children had asked for cheeseburgers and chips. She ordered a cheese fondue ravioli without really thinking about it, and then turned her attention to the maths. All the girls had been asked to revise were some quite simple linear equations and she was able to bring them both up to speed within about ten minutes. She wrote out six more equations to test them and they both got full marks, so after that she was confident her job was done. She ate the rest of her meal in silence, looking out over the lake, and listened to the stilted chatter of the children: the two boys and their sister appeared to be from a Swiss family and spoke a mixture of perfect French and perfect English, but they didn’t seem to have much to say to the Gunn twins, who in any case were more interested in their iPhones.

‘So, did the girls finish their maths?’ Madiana asked, at the end of the meal.

‘Yes, no problem. They’re primed and ready to go.’

‘Good. Well, Pascale has invited us back to her apartment for tea.’ Rachel thought, at first, that she might be included under the umbrella term ‘us’, but her employer’s next words disabused her of that idea. ‘You have three hours in which to amuse yourself. The driver will pick you up here and then you and the girls and Mr Francis will all travel home together.’

‘Fine,’ said Rachel. ‘Do you happen to know if there’s a cashpoint nearby? I didn’t have time …’

‘Oh. Of course. Take this,’ said Madiana, handing her two fifty-franc notes. ‘We’ll settle it up later.’

Rachel thanked her, allowed a waiter to help her on with her overcoat, and then went outside to become acquainted with the streets of Lausanne.

*

She walked for about an hour, at first by the side of the lake and then through the wide, almost empty boulevards of the city centre, which seemed modern and comfortable but completely without character. Even though Lausanne was a lot closer to London than the Kruger national park, and the weather was impeccably British (cold and grey), she felt just as disorientated by this abrupt transplantation to an unexpected country. She thought about calling Jamie, wanting to hear his familiar voice again, but she wasn’t sure what the cost of the call would be, and didn’t want to risk it.

Another ten minutes’ aimless walking brought her to the Avenue Bergières, where she paused outside the entrance to a museum. What appeared to be a fairly modest private house opposite the Palais de Beaulieu promised its visitors something called the ‘Collection de l’Art Brut’. Rachel had never heard the term before, but her attention was drawn by the posters outside, depicting strange animals and grotesque landscapes in bright, mesmerizing colours. Venturing inside, having handed over her money and picked up a programme, she read the following note from the museum’s curator: ‘In 1945, Jean Dubuffet decided upon the term “Art Brut” to designate a creative output by people who are self-taught, who work outside of any institutional framework, beyond all rules and all artistic considerations. For the most part, these are solitary people, persons living on the fringes of society or committed to psychiatric hospitals.’

Even this definition did not prepare her for the surprises, the infinite variety, the disturbing revelations that the museum itself held in store. For the next hour and a half, Rachel wandered through a dream world, a chaos of surreal visions and nightmarish imaginings. Distorted human figures were rendered in stark, primitive shapes and outlines. Hallucinatory creatures, half-man and halfanimal, reared up on sheets of paper on which every other inch of available space had been scribbled over with minute fragments of text whose meaning could be fathomed only by the artist. Fantastically detailed, wildly colourful pointillist canvases challenged the viewer to decide whether she was looking at something entirely abstract or, in some occult, coded way, representational. Weird political slogans were juxtaposed with deformed nudes or hideously lifelike faces constructed of found materials such as coral or sea-shells. A terrifying sculpture of an animal head boasted real, jagged and blackened teeth and a sharpened, lethal-looking horn protruding from its vulpine nose. One artist’s contribution consisted of nothing but endless letters of legal complaint and recrimination, written on massive sheets of paper with no margins and tiny, insistent handwriting, the words smothering and stumbling over each other to create (as the catalogue put it) ‘the impression of a graphic logorrhoea’.

To some, perhaps, this would seem to be the world of the madhouse. To Rachel, the museum’s contents felt as sane and as logical as anything she had seen in the last four months. She felt immediately, profoundly at home.

The museum housed a permanent collection but there was also a temporary exhibition in a room to the rear. This space was devoted, at the moment, to the ‘Bestiary’ of an artist from Barcelona called Josep Baqué.

Baqué, it seemed, had spent his peripatetic early life in Marseilles, DÜsseldorf and l’Avesnois — carving gravestones, among other things — but had returned to Barcelona in 1928 and passed the remaining forty years working there as a traffic policeman. During that time it was known that he made drawings, some of which were sought after by collectors, although, ‘modeste jusqu’à l’excès’, he always refused to sell them. Until his death in 1967, however, nobody knew the extent of his productivity: his family discovered 1,500 drawings of every shape and size, almost all of them showing mythical or semi-mythical beasts rendered in vivid colours and crude but detailed, even obsessive brushwork. Here were dragons and lizards; mutant hybrids of the horse and the flamingo; sea-snakes, turtles and multicoloured fish with looks of haunted sadness in their eyes; strange insects — beetles with butterfly wings, centipedes with bulging red lips and the teeth of a hydra. And here, too, were spiders.

Rachel had been on the point of leaving the museum, exhausted by the intensity of the experience it offered, when she came upon Josep Baqué’s spiders. And she looked on them, at once, with a shock of recognition. For more than ten years now, wherever she went, she had kept with her the playing card which had been given to her by Phoebe, the ‘Mad Bird Woman’, at the foot of the Black Tower in Beverley. It was the card that Alison had discovered, discarded and lost, in the woodland one evening; one of a pair belonging to Phoebe, and which she had given to Lu, the Chinese vagrant to whom she had briefly offered shelter in that long-lost summer, the summer of 2003. The picture on this playing card showed a spider, which Rachel had always considered to be a horrific thing: standing upright on two of its legs, and raising the others fiercely in the air as if challenging someone to a fight. And here it was again. Exactly the same. How was this possible? How could this gruesome, almost stomach-turning illustration — which could be dated, according to the catalogue, no more precisely than ‘entre 1932 et 1967’ — have found its way into a pack of Pelmanism cards which had once belonged to Phoebe’s parents? Rachel had no idea. And yet the proof was here. She looked at this painting, framed, numbered, labelled, hanging on the wall of a museum in Switzerland to which the strangest of circumstances had brought her, and knew that she was staring at one of the icons, one of the most formative images, of her own past life. Here, taking its place among all the other works which today appeared to her as pure howls of anguish; howls of terrible beauty, born of the poverty and isolation of the dispossessed.

‘These people had nothing, that’s the amazing thing,’ she said to Frederick, as she continued to pore over the museum’s hefty illustrated catalogue on the plane back to London. The reproductions of the artwork were mere distant echoes of the originals, but Rachel found herself fascinated, anyway, not by the illustrations but by the life stories of the different artists. She read of Fernando Nannetti, an electrician from Rome who suffered from lifelong hallucinations and persecution mania, but produced an enormous handwritten oeuvre carved into the walls of his psychiatric institution; of Joseph Giavarini, the ‘Prisoner of Basel’, who shot his mistress dead, and then, in prison, spent his time fashioning beautiful statuettes out of chewed bread, the only material available to him; of Marguerite Sir, a farmer’s daughter from south-eastern France who fell victim to schizophrenia, became convinced at the age of sixty-five that she was an eighteen-year-old girl about to marry, and spent the rest of her life creating and embroidering a magnificent bridal dress for the wedding that would never take place; of Clément Fraisse, who, at the age of twenty-four, after attempting to set fire to his parents’ farm using a packet of flaming bank notes representing the family savings, was sent to an asylum where for one year he lived in a cell measuring six feet by nine, the whole of which he decorated in carvings of incredible craftsmanship and detail. Turning the pages, Rachel read one story after another of this sort: unimaginable cases of confinement without end, illness without hope. ‘They had nothing, and yet they produced this astonishing work. They created. They gave. They gave these beautiful objects back to the society which had taken everything away from them.’

Freddie grunted. He was only half listening. The Sunday Times business pages were absorbing most of his attention. Everything about his posture, his indifference, his arrogance suddenly struck Rachel and ignited in her a flame of indignation.

‘Bit of a contrast,’ she said, ‘to some people I could mention. The sort of people who’ve got everything but never give anything back at all.’

‘Spare me the moralizing,’ said Freddie wearily, putting the newspaper down at last. ‘For your information, Sir Gilbert — if that’s who you’re talking about — has already created more jobs than most people will create in a lifetime. He employs people, he pays wages, he spends his money in hotels and restaurants and car showrooms. Everybody benefits from that. Everybody.’

‘Really?’ said Rachel. ‘And yet he hardly pays any taxes. Thanks to you.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh, I’m beginning to get a pretty good idea. You follow them around the world, giving them bits of paper to sign — a trust fund here, an offshore account there. Moving their money around to places where the tax people can’t get near it. Madiana probably has non-dom status, doesn’t she? What’s the betting most of Gilbert’s companies are in her name? What’s the betting he declares about the same level of income as a nurse?’

‘Everything we do,’ said Freddie, ‘is perfectly within the law.’

‘Well, one of these days the law might change.’

‘Why would that happen?’

‘Because people are getting fed up.’

‘So the revolution’s on its way, is it? “The people” are getting ready to man the barricades and dust down the guillotines? I don’t think so. Give them enough ready meals and nights in front of the TV watching celebrities being humiliated in the jungle and they won’t even want to leave their sofas. No, the law on this won’t be changing any time soon. As it happens I attended a reception at Number 11 just the other day and had a long conversation with the Chancellor, and he very much has … other priorities, I would say.’

‘You know each other, do you?’

‘Family ties. Our fathers were at prep school together.’

Rachel raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Oh my God. This country really hasn’t changed at all in the last hundred years, has it?’

‘That’s because the current system works perfectly well.’

‘Nobody minds the rich being rich,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s just that there has to come a point where enough is enough.’

Freddie laughed.

‘I mean, why do they need a basement that’s eleven storeys deep? Why did they need to fly me out to Switzerland when we could just as easily have done that homework tonight at home?’

‘One of the things I like about you, Rachel,’ Freddie said, ‘is your modesty. I don’t think you realize what an asset you are to this family. Madiana flew you out to Lausanne so she could show Pascale — who is one of the wealthiest as well as one of the snobbiest people in Switzerland — that her daughters have a private tutor who will come running at the click of a finger. You should have heard her at lunch — she never stopped talking about you. “Oh yes, she studied Latin at Oxford University.” “Of course she graduated with first-class honours.”’

‘There’s no such thing as a degree in Latin,’ Rachel pointed out. ‘I did English. And I got a 2.1.’

‘Well, good for you,’ said Freddie. ‘I think that’s jolly impressive. Have a glass of champagne to celebrate.’

But Rachel would not let the subject go. ‘The poorest half of the world has the same amount of money as the richest eighty-five people. Did you know that?’

‘Of course I did,’ he said, sounding impatient now. ‘It was in all the papers a few months ago. It’s a meaningless statistic.’

‘Meaningless? Doesn’t it make you think?’

‘It makes me think the poorest half of the world should get their act together.’

‘Really?’ Rachel stared at him, looking for traces of irony, reluctant to believe that he could actually mean what he was saying. She was forced to conclude that he did. ‘I’ll never understand you, or people like you. What … gives you pleasure, exactly? What do you live for?’

‘I’ll tell you what turns me on,’ said Freddie, although this wasn’t quite the question he’d been asked. ‘Youthful outpourings of political naivety. I find those incredibly exciting. In fact the only thing that’s more exciting is when they’re delivered in a Yorkshire accent.’ He looked around, and gestured with his eyes towards the toilet at the rear of the cabin. ‘Come on, this is our chance to join the mile-high club. On a private jet! When are you going to have an opportunity like this again?’

Rachel reminded him that there were children on board, and to emphasize the fact, she spent the rest of the flight sitting with them.

*

The Mercedes was waiting for them again at Battersea helipad, but, unusually, Faustina was there too, sitting in the car with her husband. On the drive home, she placed herself between the girls on the back seat, with Rachel in the front. Freddie took a taxi home. Faustina kept both arms around the girls and hugged them tightly. Neither she nor Jules talked very much. The atmosphere was tense, uneasy.

‘Is something wrong?’ Rachel asked, when they reached the house. Faustina took the twins straight up the front steps, almost pushing them along. Rachel and Jules took their usual route around to the back.

‘I’ll show you.’

Instead of using the staff door that opened onto the little kitchen, he led Rachel up the steps and into the garden. It was filled with builders’ junk, as always, and there were illuminated warning barriers fencing off the massive pit at its centre.

Jules took Rachel right to the eastern wall and then pointed at something on the ground. It was a scrap of tarpaulin, covering what appeared to be some sort of animal shape.

‘Mortimer,’ he said simply.

‘Oh no …’ Rachel knelt down, and reached out to touch the motionless bundle. ‘Not Mortimer.’ Her voice cracked and tears started to well up.

‘Don’t touch,’ he said. ‘Don’t look. It’s terrible.’

‘Why?’ said Rachel. ‘Why, what happened?’

‘Something attacked him. We heard terrible noises in the garden. By the time we got there, he was dead.’

‘But what could have attacked him? A fox? No, he could win a fight with a fox, surely?’

‘Bigger than a fox. Must be. Don’t look!’

Rachel had been about to raise the tarpaulin in spite of herself.

‘It’s terrible. His face — all gone. Half his body — gone. Eaten.’ He took Rachel by the arm and helped her gently to her feet. ‘Come on. Come inside for a drink. We’ll tell the girls in the morning.’

14

Later, Rachel would tell the doctors that was the day — the Sunday she went to Lausanne, the day Mortimer died — that everything started to fall apart, and the horror began.

On Tuesday she had booked her visit to see Alison in Eastwood Park.

Rachel had never visited a prison before and had no idea what to expect. It was in a rural setting and involved a long bus ride from the nearest railway station, alongside passengers who all wore the same closed, mask-like but apprehensive expressions. The gateway to the prison looked more like the entrance to a suburban housing estate than anything else. Rachel had brought every piece of ID that she possessed and this was a good thing because she had to show all of them before she could be admitted to the waiting area. Here, she and the other visitors were held for more than twenty-five minutes before a bell sounded and they were led into the hall.

Rachel had not seen Alison for five years or more, and their week together in Beverley back in the summer of 2003 seemed a lifetime ago. She was looking thin and her hair was cut shorter than Rachel could ever remember seeing it. It was not clear that she was especially happy to see her old friend. The visiting hall was full, and the tables were closer together than Rachel would have imagined. They both felt uncomfortable, at first, and their conversation was stilted, consisting mainly of Alison’s answers to questions about prison routine.

‘It’s so boring,’ she kept saying. ‘Thank God we’ve got TVs in the cells because otherwise we’d go mad. Mind you, they only let you have those because lock-up’s cheaper than letting you out and having to keep an eye on you.’

‘Do you have classes and things?’

‘Yeah, they’re pretty crap, but they give you something to do. I’ve been giving a few art classes myself. Weekends are the worst. We get locked up at five fifteen. Fuck, that gets depressing.’

Rachel reached across the table and clasped her hand.

‘It’s so good to see you again. You will come and see me when you get out, won’t you?’

‘Yeah, if you want me to,’ said Alison, uncertainly.

‘Of course I do. I’ve missed you. We shouldn’t have left it so long.’

Alison hesitated a moment, and said: ‘Well, that wasn’t exactly my fault.’

Rachel frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean,’ she answered; and now, as she looked across at Rachel, there was a challenge in her eyes.

‘Alison, I wrote to you. I phoned. I texted. You never answered. Why not?’

‘Why not?’ Alison gave a quiet, disbelieving laugh. ‘Because … Because why would I want to stay friends with someone who judged me, and disapproved of me?’

‘I never did that.’

‘Didn’t you? I seem to remember that you called me a pervert.’

‘What? I never did that.’

‘You implied it.’

‘How? How did I imply it?’

Alison lowered her voice, but her tone was still emphatic as she said: ‘By saying that incest was “right up my street”.’

Rachel stared at her, staggered by this allegation. ‘When did I say that?’

‘Just after I wrote to you to say I was gay.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Rachel. ‘I really don’t.’

Alison leaned forward, more insistent than ever. ‘We’d just started using Snapchat, remember? And I messaged you, asking if you’d got my letter.’

‘That’s right. I was at Harewood House, with my brother.’

‘And you wrote a message back. It said you were “doing the incest thing with him”.’

She sat with her arms folded, waiting for a response.

Rachel thought hard; tried to think back to that evening, sitting with her brother in the late-summer sunshine on the terrace. She and Alison had only just started using Snapchat, and she had barely used it since. She pictured herself writing with her forefinger … She couldn’t remember the message she had written, exactly, but a possible explanation began to dawn on her. A smile spread across her face, slowly, grew broader and broader, and then she put her face in her hands and rocked forwards, her body shaking. After a few seconds she looked up and said: ‘I think there’s a chance, you know— just the smallest chance — that I said I was doing the nicest thing.’ Alison’s mouth was half open in astonishment, so she repeated: ‘The nicest thing, Al. Nicest, not incest. Why would I have said incest?’

She looked at her friend, the corners of her mouth quivering, her eyes dancing with laughter. Alison stared back, still gaping stupidly. The silence seemed to go on for ever.

Then Alison, too, put her head in her hands and her laughter became so violent that it made no sound, just shook her body like an earthquake, an earthquake that was never going to stop, and when it finally died down and she was able to sit up straight and look towards Rachel directly again, she was smiling the widest, loveliest smile, a smile that was full of warmth and affection but also relief. Enormous relief. She got up and leaned across the table and folded her in a long, passionate hug. ‘Oh Rache,’ she said, ‘you don’t know how good it is to see you.’

‘You too,’ said Rachel.

‘So shall we never, ever do that again?’

‘Do what?’

‘Use social media, when we could be talking to each other.’

‘Yes,’ Rachel said, feelingly. ‘I think that would be a good idea.’

Alison withdrew to her own side of the table, laughed some more and then looked around her, taking in these drab, institutional surroundings as if she was seeing them for the first time, with a kind of wild despair.

‘I hate it in here,’ she said. ‘Thanks so much for coming. I’ve been so lonely. I know I’ve only got a couple of weeks to go, but it’s been horrible. So horrible. When I get out I’m going to find that bitch and I swear to God I’m going to tear her apart …’

‘Josephine, you mean?’ Rachel dropped her voice. ‘How did it happen, Alison? How did you end up in here?’

‘I had this girlfriend,’ Alison began. ‘Called Selena. We were together a couple of years. A lovely girl, but a bit … well, not so bright, sometimes. She was waitressing one night at a big do in Birmingham where Josephine was one of the guests, and somehow they got talking. About me. Josephine heard I was an artist, and she offered to set up a private show for me in London. Selena didn’t tell me who was doing it, she just said there was some benefactor who’d taken a shine to my work. I should really have been a bit more sensible, asked a few more questions. But it seemed like a such a break, you know? I couldn’t believe my luck.

‘I’d been doing a lot of portraits of homeless people, getting them in off the streets and painting them as if they were princes or emperors. A sort of parody of the kind of art that celebrates power and which never gets called “political” even though it obviously is. I’d started doing them when I was at college. Bit of a simple idea, really, but I thought it worked. Anyway, this gallery was hired for the night and all sorts of celebs and bigwigs turned up. It was pretty exciting, to be honest, though I didn’t make much money from it in the end. Most of the pictures were priced at five hundred quid or so and I only sold two. Most of the guests just drank the champagne and then fucked off.

‘Anyway, I know I did the wrong thing. I should have told the benefits office what I’d made. I suppose I thought I could get away with it: I’d been paid in cash and anyway … you know, it was only nine hundred quid. Not such a huge deal, in the scheme of things, I thought. I gave half the money to Mum because she really needed a new cooker: hers hadn’t been working properly all winter. Still, it was enough for Josephine. She wrote a piece about it for her paper …’

‘I know — I saw it. Your mum sent me the link.’

‘… and then the judge decided to make a big example out of it and give me the maximum sentence. So here I am.’

Once the story was told, neither of them spoke for a while. There was nothing Rachel could do to make things better: nothing she could do at all, at that moment, other than reach across and squeeze Alison’s hand again. Alison didn’t respond at first; and her words, when they came, were slow and faltering.

‘One thing about being in here: you get time to think. Especially during those bloody weekends. I mean, there are only so many episodes of Casualty and Pointless Celebrities you can watch. So I’ve been thinking a lot about Josephine, and why she decided to do that to me.’

Rachel shrugged. ‘To sell papers, I suppose.’

‘Sure. And it’s done her no harm at all — Mum told me she’s got her own column now. Weekly slot. So somebody must have liked it. But you know, why me? I know I ticked all her little hate boxes. Black? Yes. Lesbian? Yes. Disabled? Yes. On benefits? Yes. I was getting Disability Living Allowance, Housing Benefit, all sorts … But what had I actually done, to make her hate me so much?’

‘She’s probably just … fucked up herself. Had a crap childhood or something.’

Alison paused, considering this, and said: ‘I got a lot of letters, after the story ran.’

‘Letters of support, you mean?’

‘A couple of those, but mostly they were … well, horrible. Agreeing with Josephine. Blaming me. I mean, I don’t really think anyone saw the fraud itself as that big a deal, so they weren’t blaming me for what I’d done, so much. It was for … It was for being what I am. Who I am.’ She smiled, took a Kleenex out of her pocket and blew her nose violently. ‘But there’s not much I can do about that, is there?’

*

If Rachel wanted to know how her day could become more upsetting, she was about to find out, on her journey home.

The train had just pulled into Didcot Parkway, and she was staring out of the window at the towers of the power station, remembering the village of Little Calverton, and the picturebook thatched cottage Laura and Roger had bought there, with their dream of creating an idyllic childhood for their son. And while she was lost in this memory, her phone rang, tugging her out of it. She answered the call: it was Faustina, and she was dreadfully upset, almost unable to speak through her tears.

‘An accident,’ she seemed to be saying. ‘At home.’

It took Rachel a while to realize that by ‘home’ she was referring to the Marshall Islands. It took her even longer to understand what had happened.

‘A bomb? In her garden? Oh Faustina, that’s terrible … unbelievable.’

It seemed that Faustina’s granddaughter, one of her six or seven grandchildren, had been playing in the back garden when she had come across a seventy-year-old hand grenade. These islands had been used as an American military base in the Second World War, as part of the campaign against the Japanese, and there was still, incredibly, a large amount of unexploded ordnance lying around. Faustina’s granddaughter — her second daughter’s daughter, only seven years old — had picked up the grenade and was tossing it around like a tennis ball when it exploded and killed her instantly.

Rachel’s immediate impulse was to advise Faustina and Jules to fly home at once. Only as an afterthought did she ask: ‘What does Lady Gunn say?’

‘She’s not answering her phone. I think she’s on a plane. New York. She’s gone for two weeks. She’ll organize some charity ball, she said.’

‘Well, I’m sure she’d agree.’

Faustina explained that the journey back home was a long and difficult one, involving at least two changes of plane and stopovers in Seoul or Kuala Lumpar or Manila. Even if they flew out of Heathrow this evening, it would take them about thirty-six hours to get there. The cost was enormous: it would eat up most of their savings. But Rachel could see that they had no choice.

‘And the children,’ Faustina said. ‘Somebody has to look after Grace and Sophia.’

‘That’s OK,’ said Rachel. ‘I can look after them. Really. I mean, it’s just a question of feeding them and making sure they’re clean and putting them to bed. I can do that. Don’t worry about it. You go and pack, Faustina. Get ready and go.’

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?’

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.

Also, I’m taking up my pen for another good reason, quite an ordinary reason, and that’s because I’m bored, and it is this boredom — surely, this boredom and nothing else — that has been driving me crazy, provoking these silly delusions. I need a task, an occupation (of course, I thought I would find that by working for this family, but it has been a strange job so far, quite different from my expectations). And I’ve decided that this task will be to write something. I’ve not tried to write anything serious since my first year at Oxford, even though Laura, just before she left, told me that I should carry on with my writing, that she liked it, that she thought I had talent. Which meant so much, coming from her. It meant everything.

Laura told me, as well, that it was very important to be organized when you write. That you should start at the beginning and tell everything in sequence. Just as she did, I suppose, when she told me the story of her husband and the Crystal Garden. But so far, I don’t seem to be following her advice very well.

All right, then. I shall put an end to this rambling, and attempt to set down the story of my second visit to Beverley to stay with my grandparents, in the summer of 2003. A visit I made not with my brother this time but with Alison, my dear friend Alison, who at last after so many years’ mysterious distance I have found again, picking up the threads of our precious friendship. This is our story, really, the story of how we first became close, before strange — not to say ridiculous — forces intervened and drove us apart. And it’s also the story of –

But no, I mustn’t say too much just yet. Let’s go back to the very beginning.

*

Rachel stayed up most of that night writing the first few sections of her memoir. She felt tired in the morning, but also strangely refreshed and energized. After giving the girls breakfast and walking with them to school, she lay down for a short nap and then started working again. She wrote throughout the day, without interruptions. Outside, all was quiet. There was no sign of Mr Blake or the Romanian crew: she imagined that work had been suspended until a new site manager had been appointed. At three thirty, she picked the girls up from school again, and for the rest of the evening, again, she didn’t give them any extra lessons or ask them to do any homework. This time, being more practised at it, she was able to get them into bed more quickly and with less fuss. By nine o’clock she was at her desk once again. Looking back across the years, remembering the youthful friendship between Alison and herself, picturing the Beverley Westwood in summer sunshine, trying to evoke the love between her grandparents when they were both still in good health, she managed to escape the feeling of dread which she knew would otherwise envelope her if she had nothing to concentrate upon except the stillness of this house and the shapeless terrors which haunted its ruined garden.

She wrote for forty-five minutes and then, at a quarter to ten, there was a ringing on the front door bell. She ran down to the nearest video monitor, which was on the first-floor landing, and turned it on. A grainy black and white image of Frederick Francis appeared. He was standing outside the hoarding waiting to be admitted. She buzzed him in and then went further downstairs to open the front door.

‘Hello,’ he said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me calling on you out of the blue.’

‘Not at all,’ said Rachel. ‘But Gilbert isn’t here. Madiana’s in New York and he’s … well, I don’t know where he is, exactly.’

‘I know,’ said Frederick. ‘It was you I wanted to see.’

‘Oh. Well, in that case … Come in.’

She led him into the sitting room, a place she rarely visited.

‘Are you going to offer me a drink?’ Freddie said, sitting down on the sofa nearest the door.

Rachel could smell alcohol on his breath already.

‘I’m not sure that it’s mine to offer.’

‘Oh, come on. After all you’re doing for this family at the moment, you’d be entitled to bathe in champagne every night.’

‘In a diamanté bath,’ said Rachel, smiling. ‘All right then, where do they keep the booze?’

Frederick rose to his feet and proved that he knew exactly where to find the drinks cupboard: it stood flush with the bookshelves that were full of unread eighteenth-century first editions. After a quick search among the bottles he plucked one out with an air of triumph.

‘Twenty-year-old Lagavulin,’ he noted, uncorking the bottle and pouring two large tumblerfuls. ‘Almost the same age as you, in fact.’

‘I don’t really drink wh —’

‘This is more than a whisky. It’s nectar.’ He clinked her glass. ‘Come on. Chin-chin.’

Rachel took a sip of the leather-coloured, peaty Scotch and had to concede that it was superb. All the same, she resolved not to drink too much.

‘So, to what do I owe this pleasure?’ she asked.

‘Well,’ said Freddie, ‘I was having a drink nearby, and I thought I might drop in to find out how you were coping, all by yourself, and also … Also, as it happens, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about our conversation the other day, on the plane.’

He had not returned to the sofa. He was pacing the room uncertainly, shooting glances of enquiry at Rachel’s face as he spoke.

‘Oh?’ she said.

‘The fact is, Rachel, that you obviously have rather a low opinion of me and … I’m not comfortable with that.’

‘I’m sorry if I gave that impression. It had just been a bit of a weird day, that’s all …’

‘I think it’s about more than just one day. You hate me. You don’t like what I do.’

‘No,’ said Rachel, taking another sip of whisky, and realizing that this conversation was going to be every bit as awkward as she had feared. ‘I don’t hate you. It’s true that I think your work is — well, a bit unethical …’

‘A bit! Come off it, Rachel. What I do stinks. It stinks to high heaven.’

She was taken aback. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Well, clearly you’ve had something of a change of heart in the last few days. But those are your words, Freddie. Not mine.’

‘I thought a bit of plain speaking was called for, for a change. And yes, I have had a change of heart. And I lied to you on the plane, Rachel. I said that everything Gilbert and I do is within the law. Well, it isn’t. At least one of the funds I’ve set up in Madiana’s name could land all of us in prison. And perhaps it should.’

‘I visited someone in prison, this week, as a matter of fact. A friend of mine. She’s doing three months for benefit fraud.’

‘I bet she hasn’t fiddled a fraction of what I’ve siphoned off for Gilbert over the years.’

Rachel wished that he would sit down. His pacing was beginning to make her dizzy.

‘Well, these are fine words, Freddie. So what are you going to do about it?’

‘I’m thinking,’ he said, ‘about going to HMRC and telling them everything. Or perhaps taking the story to the papers.’

Rachel took another, very cautious sip of whisky, and allowed herself a long look at Freddie while her lips were still to the glass. Nothing about this sudden conversion of his rang true, to her ears.

‘I wouldn’t do anything drastic,’ she said. ‘Having seen the inside of a prison, I don’t think it would suit you. And please don’t turn your whole life around on my account. Whatever your ethics, I don’t dislike you personally. Not at all.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘Because it may surprise you to learn that your opinion means a lot to me.’

‘And why would that be?’

And suddenly he was upon her, pressing her up against the bookshelves, causing her to spill the rest of her whisky on the floor, his lips crushing down on hers, the full weight of his body bearing down on her. ‘Because you are … so … fucking … gorgeous,’ he said, between heavy, alcohol-soaked breaths. ‘Because … I can’t die happy … until I’ve got inside your pants …’

‘Get OFF me!’ Rachel shouted, and pushed him away with a force that sent him reeling across the room. He toppled against the grand piano, steadied himself, and then for a few moments they stared at each other. When he made no further move, she pointed at the door. ‘Get out. Get out now.’

It seemed that he was about to obey her. He wiped his mouth and started making for the door, but as he was passing beside her he made another lunge, grabbing her around the waist this time and throwing her to the floor. Now he was on top of her and she was pinned to the carpet.

‘Get OFF!’ she screamed again, and just then a child’s voice said, ‘Rachel?’ and they both looked towards the doorway, in which Grace and Sophia were standing, side by side, wearing their matching pyjamas and looking rumpled and sleepy.

Averting his eyes from the children’s questioning gaze, Freddie staggered to his feet and went over to the mirror above the fireplace, where he straightened his tie and smoothed down his hair. Rachel was still on the floor. The impact of the fall had bruised her and for the time being she didn’t think she could get up.

‘Are you all right?’ Sophia said, and they both came forward and held out their hands to help her.

Without another word, or so much as a glance in their direction, Freddie left the room and strode across the hallway towards the front door. They heard it open and then slam shut.

In a slow, painful movement, Rachel rocked herself into a sitting position, and then stayed that way for a while. Grace and Sophia knelt down on either side of her and put their arms around her. It was this display of sympathy, above all — so unexpected, so unlooked-for — that gave her the strength to raise herself finally, and stand upright.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you back into bed. I think we all need another night-time story, don’t you?’

‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye to Mr Francis?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I think he knows the way out.’ And then, holding hands, the three of them slowly climbed the stairs to the second floor.

*

Freddie certainly knew the way out. But he was in no hurry to leave. For ten minutes he stood in the Gunns’ front garden, next to the temporary site office, and tried to calm himself, breathing slowly and heavily, his breath steaming into the night air. It was a clear night, cloudless and starry. The moon, three-quarters full, threw antic shadows across the paving slabs, the patches of dried-out mud and cement, the temporary planking. The disorder of the builders’ materials seemed to suit his own deranged state of mind. He felt no immediate inclination to pass through the door in the hoarding. The thought of hailing a cab and making the journey home sickened him.

At first, when he became aware that he was being watched, his reaction was surprisingly calm. He did not know where the creature had come from, or how it had crept up on him so silently, and for a moment he pondered these questions in a mood of dispassionate curiosity. It dawned on him only slowly that he was in mortal danger; and not just that, but that he was about to die in the most grotesque and unbelievable way. The eyes, the two high, widely separated, beady amber eyes, gazed at him with fixed malevolence. The creature’s legs were long and double-jointed, rising at their apex to a height taller than Freddie himself. The belly, the huge, distended belly, was covered with short hairs which in the moonlight appeared to have a greenish hue; it sagged heavily against the ground, an obscene sac containing vast, revolting liquid secrets.

The creature’s legs quivered and twitched as it readied for the pounce.

Only now did Freddie start to back towards the wall. But with the third or fourth step he tripped and fell, so that he was prone and supine as the spider advanced towards and over him, its legs thrashing and scuttling, the stomach dragging itself across Freddie’s shins, knees and thighs, then over his torso before finally settling on his face, so that the entire vile, colossal weight of the thing was pushing down on him, the stench of it, the thick, coarse texture of the body forcing the gorge up to his throat and sending him quickly, irresistibly into a swoon from which he was never to recover.

17

‘What a whopper!’ bellowed Grace.

‘What — a — whopper!’ echoed Sophia, at half the speed and in a much deeper voice, and, swept up by uncontrollable laughter, they both started rolling around on the playroom floor.

The credits and the title music came up on the screen all too quickly and they started shouting:

‘Oh, Rachel, can we see it again? Please, Rachel!’

‘Just the last scene, Rachel … please!’

Who would have guessed it, Rachel thought, as she rewound the DVD about three minutes. Who would have guessed that of all the things she could have shown them, it would be this terrible, creaky, inept, black and white British comedy film from the early 1960s that would send them into such paroxysms of delight, breaking down the final barriers of icy composure which they had maintained in front of her for so long? She had only bought the DVD two years ago because Laura had mentioned it to her as forming part of her researches: warning her, at the same time, that watching the whole thing would probably destroy her will to live. But the last scene, at least — or rather, the final gag — was a miracle of audacious stupidity. After ninety tedious minutes of joking around with fake Loch Ness Monsters, the real monster (itself about as dreadful an example of low-budget special effects as you could imagine) reared its plastic head out of the water and uttered the three immortal words that Grace and Sophia found so hilarious, and which they were now repeating over and over again, trying to imitate the monster’s droll, deadpan voice as they waited impatiently for the scene to restart.

‘One more time,’ she said. ‘One more time, or we’re going to be late for the train.’

It was Sunday morning, and for the second week in a row she had cancelled her regular date with Jamie. Not, this time, because she had been brusquely summoned to a foreign country to help with ten minutes’ homework. No, this time she had made the decision herself (and had arranged to see him tomorrow during the girls’ school hours instead) because she was determined to get them out of the house for the day, and to take them not to a museum, gallery or gourmet restaurant, but somewhere where they might have some mindless, uncomplicated fun. Chessington World of Adventures seemed the obvious choice. It wasn’t the easiest place to reach by train, but that in itself was part of her plan. She wanted to show them that not everybody in the country travelled in a chauffeured limousine. Other modes of transport were available.

In any case, they ended up having a glorious day. Grace’s favourite ride was the Scorpion Express; Sophia inclined towards the Rattlesnake. They both enjoyed getting soaking wet on Rameses’ Revenge, and they emerged looking pleasantly shocked, dazed and dizzy from the Dragon’s Fury. For Rachel, most of the time was spent standing with them in queues, or watching them on rides and trying to take photographs while they whizzed past on some rollercoaster or carousel. A few months ago, she would never have imagined that this was how she would choose to spend an entire Sunday. But there was a reward at the end of it, and it was a precious one: by the time they returned to Turngreet Road, the twins were more animated and talkative than she’d ever known them, and they both promised her that it had easily been the best day of their lives so far. They had loved everything about it, even the terrible junk food and the crowded, severely delayed train ride home. In fact, sitting opposite them in the packed carriage and watching the bright-eyed curiosity on their faces as they looked around at the other passengers, enthralled by the novelty of finding themselves in contact with this mass of ordinary humanity, Rachel wondered whether this hadn’t been their favourite part of all.

*

The next day she went to see Jamie in Crouch End, where he shared a house with six other students. He paid almost £200 a week, for which he was given sole occupancy of a tiny bedroom on the second floor. All the rooms in the house — including what used to be the sitting and dining rooms — had been turned into bedrooms and rented out, so Jamie rarely ventured out of his own bedroom unless it was to go down to the kitchen and make some instant coffee or microwave himself a meal. His bedroom was just about big enough to hold his single bed and the child’s dressing table which served as his desk.

‘I can only stay a couple of hours,’ Rachel said, explaining that she had to be back in Chelsea to pick the girls up from school. It was annoying, then, that Jamie proposed watching a film, and would not be talked out of it: all the more so because the film was Ghosts, Nick Broomfield’s dramatization of the Morecambe Bay cocklepickers’ tragedy of 2004, which he needed to watch for the latest chapter of his thesis.

‘Why are you always thinking about work?’ said Rachel, who after the stresses of the last week had come with an entirely different purpose in mind.

‘It’s only ninety-six minutes,’ said Jamie, checking the back of the DVD box. ‘We can do something else afterwards.’

Despite herself, Rachel could not help finding it an absorbing and upsetting film. It followed the misfortunes of a young Chinese illegal immigrant forced into ever more insecure jobs within the food industry, in order to pay back money to the ‘Snakeheads’ who had smuggled her into the UK. Rachel found that the story had a strong resonance with her memories of Lu, the Chinese worker Phoebe had looked after for a few days back in 2003. It was an odd coincidence to be watching a film that so clearly reminded her of this episode now, just when she had spent the last few days attempting to set it all down on paper. When the film was over, Jamie sat at his desk and started making notes.

‘Do you have to do that now?’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go in like … half an hour. Forty minutes tops.’

‘Just a minute,’ said Jamie. ‘There are so many things I’ll need to say about that film. Really I could start a whole new chapter about it.’

He scribbled rapidly in his notebook for another two or three minutes, his brow so furrowed with concentration that he did not even notice what Rachel was doing behind his back. When he turned to speak to her again, he found that she had stripped off her clothes and was stretched out beneath his duvet.

He put his pencil down.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know … I mean …’

‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘Are we going to do it or not?’

He pulled off his shirt and slid in beside her. Rachel put her arms around him and planted a long, moist kiss on his mouth.

‘I was attacked last week,’ she murmured, as Jamie’s hands began to glide over her body. Immediately he stopped and pulled back.

‘What?’

‘This guy came round to the house and … tried it on with me.’

‘Guy? What guy? Who was it?’

‘Someone I know. A friend of Gilbert’s.’

‘Did you report it to the police? Did he hurt you?’

‘He probably would have done. But he didn’t get very far.’

Jamie pulled away even further, sitting upright and staring down at her angrily.

‘Tell me his name.’

‘No. Why?’

‘Tell me the bastard’s name.’

‘Then what are you going to do?’

‘I’ll go and smash his face in.’

Rachel tried hard, but couldn’t refrain from giggling.

‘Come off it. You?’

‘Yes, me.’

She reached up, put her arms around Jamie’s shoulders, and pulled him back towards her.

‘That’s very touching, sweetheart, but it’s the last thing I want.’

She kissed him again.

‘What do you want instead?’ he asked.

‘A bit of tender loving care would be nice,’ said Rachel, taking his hand and placing it carefully between her legs.

They made love twice: the first time being slow, and gentle, and deeply satisfying, the second being much more fierce and urgent. Then, just as Rachel was about to reach her second climax, Jamie’s mobile phone rang. To her amazement, he leaned over to answer it.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘it might be important.’

‘Fuck that,’ she said, biting him frantically on the neck. ‘This is important.’

But still, Jamie craned over and glanced even more closely at the name on the screen.

‘I’ll have to get this,’ he said. ‘It’s Laura.’

He picked up the phone and answered the call. Furious, Rachel flopped back on to the bed, panting heavily, more with frustration than anything else. She had been on the very brink of orgasm. She couldn’t believe that he’d abandoned her at that precise moment.

She ran her hands through her hair and then down the side of her neck, feeling the sweat that had gathered there. For a while she was too agitated to take any notice of what he was saying. Then she became aware that Jamie and Laura were making some kind of arrangement to meet tomorrow evening: there was mention of a train journey. Then Jamie was asking her about someone who should, it seemed, have been joining them, but had gone missing. ‘Well, when did anyone last see him …?’ he was saying. Rachel could hear Laura’s voice at the other end of the line and could tell that the conversation was going to continue for some time. That was as much as she could tolerate. She got out of bed, clutching the duvet to hide her nudity, and pulled on her clothes as quickly as possible. By the time Jamie had finished his call, she was fully dressed and standing at the bedroom door.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked, looking genuinely surprised.

‘Back to work,’ she said. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Me? I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Tomorrow, I mean.’

‘Oh, that … Laura’s asked me to go up to Scotland with her. Didn’t I mention that?’

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘It’s this committee she’s on. They’re going on a jolly to Inverness.’

‘Inverness?’

‘The Scottish Tourist Board have asked them to come up and put a price on the Loch Ness Monster.’

‘How completely ridiculous. And you’re going because …?’

‘She thinks it’ll be good experience for me. You don’t mind, do you?’

Rachel said nothing. Jamie frowned.

‘A strange thing, though,’ he said. ‘Lord Lucrum, the head of the committee … Nobody can find him. He seems to have gone missing.’

At any other time, Rachel might have found this interesting. At the moment, though, she was far too discomposed, both physically and emotionally, to give the subject even cursory thought.

‘’Bye, then,’ she said. ‘And thanks for showing me the film. It was great.’

And before leaving, she gave Jamie another kiss on the mouth: one which already foretold, in its briefness and politeness, the death throes of a relationship which had scarcely begun.

18

The silence had returned. As soon as the girls went to bed, as soon as their television was turned off and their friendly chatter came to an end, that was when the silence entered the house, climbing the stairs and wreathing its way into every room like a trail of mist.

Rachel tried to ignore the silence. Tried to pretend it wasn’t there. She turned on her computer and streamed some music. She Googled the Morecambe Bay cocklepickers and, after reading some old news stories about them, added a final few paragraphs to her memoir. Still she felt horribly apprehensive and uneasy. Every muscle in her body was taut with anxiety.

While she was online, she did some more browsing and read some of today’s newspaper stories:

HELP FIND OUR JOSEPHINE, one headline said.

Thinking that there was a distant, subtle noise outside, out in the garden, Rachel turned off the music and opened the bedroom window. The restless, eternal hum of London was all that she heard. She looked out into the night. She looked down at the pit. There was nothing. No sound. No movement.

The recent death of a seven-year-old girl on the Marshall Islands could have been averted, an expert has claimed.

Chris Baxter, operations director of SafeSpace Ordnance Removal, a small NGO which has been working to raise awareness of the dangers of unexploded WW2 ordnance on the tiny group of islands, said that the area where the girl was playing should have been cleared by now.

‘Our programme of clearing this area was 70 % complete,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately our operation was closed down when one of our competitors, Winshaw Clearance, was chosen to complete the contract. As of today, my understanding is that Winshaw have yet to commence any operations in the area.’

The CEO of Winshaw Clearance, Helke Winshaw, was unavailable for comment.

A flapping noise reached her from the garden. It looked like the corner of the tarpaulin had come loose again. How had that happened?

A rustling noise, a scuttling. Like legs on loose gravel.

All in her mind. All imagination.

Fears are growing for the safety of Lord Lucrum, chairman of the Institute for Quality Valuation, who has not been seen for ten days.

The flapping of the tarpaulin was more insistent now. Rachel decided that she would have to go outside and check on it. She tiptoed quickly down the first flight of stairs, not knowing why it felt so important to be quiet. The mirrored door was wedged open, as it had been for the last few days. She slipped through it and peeped around Sophia’s half-open bedroom door. The twins had both chosen to sleep in the same bed, for some reason, their arms wrapped around each other. She could hear their gentle breathing.

Down two more flights of stairs, and into the staff kitchen. She turned on all the lights. Then, very carefully, she unbolted and opened the kitchen door. The cold night air rushed in at once, confronting her, encircling her. She stood on the threshold, not crossing it yet, listening for the tiniest of sounds, her head cocked, as tense as a hunting dog sniffing for a hint of its prey.

She stayed like that for twenty seconds or more, until there was a sudden, unexpected noise which in the stillness of the night seemed deafeningly loud and almost made her jump in the air. It was the buzzer at the front door.

Clutching her heart, Rachel rushed upstairs to look at the nearest entryphone screen.

In her haste, she had omitted to do two things. She did not close the back door properly. And although, while standing in the doorway, she had looked all around her, she had not looked down. Had she done so she would have seen, a few inches from the ground, a thin length of silvery cord, sticky and glistening, stretched across the doorway like a tripwire, then twining itself around a drainpipe and disappearing back into the pit.

*

She did not recognize the two callers at the front door, but when she went down to speak to them they both produced identity cards proving them to be detectives. One of them looked to be in his early fifties; the other seemed much younger, about twenty years younger.

‘My name is Detective Constable Pilbeam,’ the younger one said. ‘And this is my colleague, Detective Chief Inspector Capes.’

‘Otherwise known as the Caped Crusader,’ said his companion, with a hopeful smile.

Rachel returned the smile, even though she found this rather an odd remark.

‘Come in,’ she said, and led them into the sitting room. Neither of them took off their coats, but they both sat down on the nearest sofa and seemed ready to make themselves comfortable.

‘I didn’t know they called you that,’ DC Pilbeam said to his colleague, in an undertone.

‘What?’

‘The Caped Crusader.’

‘Well, they do,’ he answered sharply.

Rachel wondered whether she should offer them a drink, then decided against it. It would have been a friendly thing to do, but they probably weren’t allowed to drink on duty.

‘Who does?’ said DC Pilbeam, apparently unwilling to drop the subject.

‘Mm?’

‘Who calls you that?’

‘Everybody.’

‘I’ve never heard them.’

‘I wonder,’ said Rachel, growing impatient, ‘if you’d mind telling me what this is about.’

‘Ah. Yes.’ DCI Capes sat up straight, and adopted a formal tone of voice. ‘We’re speaking to Ms Rachel Wells, I take it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you are employed as private tutor to the daughters of Sir Gilbert and Lady Gunn?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. We’re here to make some routine enquiries about a missing person. Would we be right in thinking that you’re acquainted with one Frederick Francis, Senior Partner in the firm of Bonanza Tax Management?’

‘I know Mr Francis, yes. Is he the person who’s gone missing?’

‘Mr Francis has not been home for several days, and nobody has seen him in that time. His friends are growing concerned. Does this come as a surprise to you?’

‘That he’s gone missing, or that he has friends who are concerned about him?’

DC Pilbeam smiled. DCI Capes didn’t.

‘Please, Ms Wells, this could be a very serious matter.’

‘What’s it got to do with me anyway?’

‘Last Thursday evening,’ said DC Pilbeam, consulting his notebook, ‘Mr Francis was having a drink at the Henry Root bar around the corner. He got into conversation with one of the ladies behind the bar, and told her that he was coming round to this house. To see you. She said that at this point in the evening, he was rather the worse for drink.’ He looked up. ‘Did he visit you that evening?’

‘Yes,’ said Rachel, ‘he did.’

‘At what time?’

‘About quarter to ten.’

‘Would you mind describing the encounter?’

‘Well, there was nothing very special about it,’ said Rachel, suddenly feeling nervous and evasive. ‘We … had a drink together. Talked about this and that.’

‘What was the purpose of his visit, in your view?’

‘He’d heard that I was here by myself, looking after the children, and he was — concerned about me, I suppose. Where did he go afterwards, do you know?’

‘What time did he leave?’

‘Probably about five to ten.’

‘I see. So it was a very short visit. Surprisingly short, one might say.’

‘Yes, I suppose it was.’

‘And did you see Mr Francis leave the premises?’

‘No. I heard him leave by the front door. But after that I took the girls back upstairs.’

‘The girls? So they were witnesses to his visit as well?’

‘Yes, they were.’

‘But if I understand you correctly, you can’t actually say for certain that Mr Francis left the premises at all.’

‘Well, I think I would have noticed if he’d been hiding here for the last week.’

‘This short conversation you had with him,’ said DCI Capes, ‘was it … friendly, amicable?’

Rachel nodded. ‘Yes, I’d say so.’

‘You didn’t argue, at all? There was no quarrel? No … lovers’ tiff?’

‘He was not my lover.’

To emphasize this point, Rachel had raised her voice, but at the same time it cracked and broke. She sank down into an armchair and put her head in her hands. DC Pilbeam immediately leaped up from the sofa. He crouched down beside her and put a comforting hand on her knee.

‘Ms Wells, are you all right? You seem rather distressed.’

‘Oh, I’m … Not really … I don’t know, I’m fine … It’s just … It’s this house,’ she said, fighting back tears. ‘I hate it here. At night it’s dark and lonely and I start to imagine all sorts of strange things. And I get worried about the girls. So worried about them. I worry that they’re not safe.’

‘Why would they not be safe?’

‘I don’t know. There’s some … danger here. I’m convinced of it.’

‘Is that what you thought when Mr Francis called?’ said DCI Capes, from across the room. ‘That he might pose a danger to those girls?’

DC Pilbeam shot him a warning glance: he did not seem to like the slightly aggressive tone of this question. His own voice was much smoother and more reassuring.

‘Ms Wells,’ he said, ‘I’m going to tell you a little bit more about this case, and why we consider it so important.’

Rachel wiped the tears away from her eyes, and nodded.

‘The fact is that Mr Francis is not the only person to have disappeared recently in this vicinity.’

‘Oh?’

‘DCI Capes and I suspect that his disappearance is linked to five others, which have all occurred in the last few weeks. First of all, Ms Josephine Winshaw-Eaves, the newspaper columnist. Then Mr Giles Trending, the CEO of Stercus Television. Then Philip Stanmore, a director of Sunbeam Foods. Then Helke Winshaw, CEO of Winshaw Clearance plc. And also Lord Lucrum, head of the Institute for Quality Valuation. Mr Francis is the sixth person to have disappeared. One thing that all these people have in common is that they either lived, or were last seen, within a few hundred yards of this street.’

DCI Capes added: ‘But that’s not all they have in common.’

‘Indeed not,’ said DC Pilbeam, rising to his feet and beginning to pace the room. ‘But this is where the theories of my colleague and myself diverge.’

‘My junior colleague,’ said DCI Capes, ‘is a remarkable young man. He believes that in order to solve a crime, you have to look at it from the political angle. Using the word in its broadest sense, that is. I have to say that in the past, his theories have produced impressive results. So that’s the approach we intend to take in this instance.’

‘All the same,’ said DC Pilbeam, ‘as we’ve learned from past experience, we must be careful not to jump to the first and most obvious conclusion, even if it looks as if —’

‘There is no mystery, Nathan, about what these six people have in common. Just because I was the one who found out the link —’

‘What is the link?’ Rachel asked, butting in before their argument spiralled out of control.

‘It’s perfectly simple,’ said DCI Capes. ‘All six of them were present at a reception held last month at Number 11, Downing Street.’ He turned to DC Pilbeam with a challenging gleam in his eye. ‘Well? Isn’t that so?’

‘Yes. Absolutely. I don’t deny it. But I still think we should look beyond that …’

‘Beyond that!’ said Capes, in a scoffing tone. ‘To what? What else is there?’

‘There is something else,’ said Pilbeam. ‘There is the Winshaw family itself.’

‘Not them again!’ said Capes. ‘How many times do I have to point it out to you? Only two of these people are members of the Winshaw family, and one of those only by marriage.’

‘True,’ said Pilbeam. ‘But look at the other connections. Mr Trending heads the steering committee of the Winshaw Prize, established in honour of Roderick Winshaw. Mr Francis began his career as a trader at Stewards’ Bank, as a protégé of Thomas Winshaw. Lord Lucrum used to work —’

‘— with Henry Winshaw, on the committee that started dismantling the NHS,’ Rachel said.

‘Quite,’ said DC Pilbeam, so absorbed in his own reasoning that he barely noticed where this contribution had come from. ‘And Philip Stanmore’s Sunbeam Foods —’

‘— is the biggest member of the Brunwin Group, established by Dorothy Winshaw in the seventies and eighties.’

‘Exactly!’ Pilbeam turned to his colleague. ‘Don’t you see? You have to dig deeper. Have you read that book yet? The one that I lent you?’

‘Which book?’ said DCI Capes.

Pilbeam raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘The Winshaw Legacy,’ he said, ‘by Michael Owen. Everything you need to know about the family is —’

He broke off, his attention suddenly caught by an object placed on top of the grand piano. He went over and picked it up. It was a book.

‘But … this is extraordinary,’ he said. ‘This is the very book I’m talking about. How …? What …?’

Rachel reached out and took it from him, her hands shaking.

‘I’ve been reading this,’ she said. ‘A friend of mine lent it to me the other day.’

‘I see,’ said DC Pilbeam, taking a step back, and eyeing her very differently, with a new closeness. ‘And that, I suppose, is why you are so familiar with these connections I was making?’

‘Yes,’ said Rachel. ‘I suppose it is.’

‘Interesting,’ said DC Pilbeam. ‘Very interesting.’ He was staring at her, now, so intently that she was obliged to look away and blurt out, in a strong but quavering voice:

‘I have nothing to do with Mr Francis’s disappearance. Or any of these other people. I’ve got nothing to do with any of this. I shouldn’t even be in this house. I don’t belong here.’

Her lips trembled and she fell silent. But this time it was DCI Capes, rather than his younger colleague, who took pity on her and, rising to his feet, said in a kindly voice:

‘Of course you have nothing to do with it, miss. We know that. Take no notice of him and his theories.’ He tapped his colleague on the arm. ‘Come on, Pilbeam. It’s time we were off. And listen to me, for a change: I’ve already cracked this case. Have a look at the guest list for that reception, and your suspect will be there. Number 11 is the key, I tell you. It’s as simple as that!’

*

The men were gone. The house was silent again.

Rachel went back to the sitting room, opened the Gunns’ drinks cupboard and took out the bottle of twenty-year-old Lagavulin. It seemed wasteful to use such a rare and valuable whisky simply to steady her nerves, but such considerations did not weigh with her any more. She poured herself a tumbler at least three-quarters full and sat on the piano stool, drinking it slowly and methodically. From time to time she looked at the book on the piano and wondered how it had got there. She did not remember bringing it down here, but she knew her behaviour was becoming erratic and forgetful.

She had almost finished drinking the whisky when she heard a noise in the hallway. A swift, busy rustling, as of legs upon the marble tiles. She stood up and walked slowly across the room. She stopped before reaching the doorway, listening. Then, very slowly, very carefully, she crept towards the doorway and peeped round it.

The hallway was empty.

The hallway was empty, but something had changed. It took Rachel a few moments to realize what it was. On the staircase, something had been twined around the banister. Rachel stepped forward, relieved now, assuming that the children were playing a joke on her: they had stolen downstairs and wrapped a ball of string or a washing line around the uprights. But no, as she came closer, she thought that it didn’t look like string. It was thinner, and more silvery. She reached out and touched it and it stuck to her hand.

Shaking the thread loose, Rachel followed it down the hallway until she came to the stairwell that led down to the family kitchen. At this point, her way was blocked: and this time, there was no mistaking the obstruction. It was a giant web, made of the same glutinous, gossamer thread.

Rachel stared at the web in horror, but soon, not knowing where her own strength or courage was coming from, she found herself reaching out and tearing at it with frantic, clutching fingers. It stuck to her everywhere: her shoulders, her legs, especially her face, but finally, panting with effort and revulsion, she had broken her way through it. She rushed down the stairs and into the kitchen, which was in darkness. Hollow with dread at the thought of what she might see, she flicked the lights on.

Nothing there. She ran back up to the hallway, then upstairs to Sophia’s bedroom. The girls were still asleep, blameless, angelic. Through the mirrored door, back into the servants’ half of the house, then all the way down the narrow staircase, and into the staff kitchen. Here, threads and webs had been strung up everywhere. The very air was thick with them. Rachel forced her way through them — a particularly tough thread got caught in her mouth, and she bit through it, almost gagging at the bitter, poisonous taste — until she reached the knife drawer, which she threw open, extracting the biggest, sharpest, most lethal carving knife she could find, fully ten inches long.

She turned and faced the back doorway. The door was open. How could that have happened? If it had been her doing, then she’d been very careless.

A particularly thick and elaborate web had been woven across the doorway, but she slashed her way through it somehow, then ran straight out into the garden and towards the corner of the pit where the tarpaulin had been loosened. In the distance, a siren wailed, grew louder and closer, then faded into the distance: a reminder that elsewhere, not far away, normal life was still in progress, bringing home to Rachel the nightmarish unreality of her own situation.

The single thread that led down into the pit itself was as thick as a rope. She sawed away at it for a few seconds and it snapped with a satisfying twang. Then Rachel lifted the tarpaulin and peered inside.

She could see nothing. Just a yawning void; a bottomless pool of blackness.

She stared harder. Perhaps she could discern some outlines. A platform, was it, down there? Scaffolding? Was that an immense ladder fixed to the wall? Impossible to say.

She must have stared into the darkness for three minutes or more. The handle of the knife grew moist with the sweat from her palm. And then, at last, she did see something. Way down in the depths of the shaft, more than a hundred feet away, two pinpricks of light suddenly appeared. A pair of eyes. Whatever the eyes belonged to, it had seen her, and it was staring back at her.

Rachel met the creature’s distant gaze and held it. She stopped breathing. She clutched the knife more tightly. She felt herself mesmerized. She couldn’t move.

And then, at the same distance, at the very bottom of the pit, two more amber pinpricks appeared. Then two more, and two more, and then four more, and a dozen more. Soon Rachel knew that she was being watched by at least fifty pairs of eyes.

Still she did not move. She could not force herself from the spot until the eyes themselves started moving. In response to some sort of collective will, the creatures stirred themselves and smoothly, silently, with unthinkable agility, they began to swarm up the sheer walls of the pit. Their progress was swift and inexorable. In just a matter of seconds they were only fifty feet away. The eyes came closer and closer, never diverting their gaze from Rachel for an instant.

Then, and only then, did she scream. She screamed and ran: ran back to the house, where she slammed the kitchen door shut, bolted it, ran to the staircase, closed that door behind her as well, then hurtled up the stairs, up to the ground floor, the first floor, the second floor and the mirrored doorway that led through to the other half of the house.

Before passing through it for the last time, she turned and looked out from the landing window. The spiders were massing in the garden, overturning the builders’ tools, scuttling over the garden walls, breaking down the trellising. And some of them were trying to get into the house.

Rachel ran into Sophia’s room and shook the twins awake.

‘Get up! Get dressed!’ she shouted. ‘We’ve got to leave, now!’

The girls tumbled out of bed drowsily and rubbed their eyes.

‘What? Where are our clothes?’

‘No time! Put your dressing gowns on.’

They struggled into their dressing gowns. Grace got her arm caught in one of the sleeves and realized she was trying to put it on inside out. Sophia fumbled for ages in her attempt to knot the cord at her waist.

‘Follow me,’ said Rachel.

She grasped Sophia’s hand, and Sophia grasped Grace’s hand, and in that way she tugged them out of the bedroom and onto the main staircase. Their way was blocked by two dense, glistening webs, which she slashed to the floor with a couple of strokes of her blade.

‘What are you swinging that knife around for?’ asked Grace.

‘Why do you even have a knife?’ asked Sophia.

They reached the main hallway and Rachel threw open the front door. Three spiders were gathered at the foot of the steps, barring their path to the door in the hoarding. They were huge, and their swollen bodies shone in the moonlight, burnished with lurid green.

‘Keep back,’ said Rachel. ‘We have to get past them.’

The girls waited at the top of the steps, while Rachel descended, step by step, her knife outstretched. The creatures never took their small, vicious, bulbous eyes off the blade. When Rachel lunged out at them they hissed, reared up on their two back legs, but gradually backed off.

‘Now!’ Rachel called to the girls. ‘To the doorway! Run!’

Grace and Sophia tore down the steps, through the mass of builders’ rubble, past the site office and waited panting by the door. Rachel joined them, walking backwards, the knife still outstretched to keep the monsters at bay, then switched the electronic latch and shouldered the door open. They were out in the street.

‘Where are we going?’ said Sophia. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to go back to bed.’

They were out in the street, but they were not safe. The creatures were here as well. In their loathsome droves they swarmed, milling along the pavements and carriageway, spreading destruction in their path. They clambered on to cars, overturning them, toppling the massed rows of Range Rovers, Porsches and Jaguars. They ran up the walls of the vast, arrogant houses, tearing into brickwork, smashing glass. Property was their first target; after that would come people. The moon was at its fullest and everywhere Rachel looked she could see the green bodies of these vile, mutant insects, crawling across white stuccoed walls, rearing up triumphantly at the summit of chimney stacks. The night air erupted with shrill, deafening noise as a symphony of burglar alarms began to play up and down the street.

‘Hurry!’ she shouted to the twins. ‘We’ve still got time!’

Grabbing Sophia’s hand again, she began to drag them both along, breaking into a sprint. Miraculously, the hideous, rampant creatures would back off and allow them to pass whenever they were approached. And so the thing that finally stopped them in their tracks, at the end of the street, was not a spider at all, but a human obstruction: a man. DCI Capes, standing at the corner, who seized Rachel in a rugby tackle and brought her to the ground, while DC Pilbeam wrested the knife from her grasp.

‘It’s all right,’ one of them was saying. ‘Calm down. It’s all right now. Everybody’s safe.’

They held her like that, pinning her to the asphalt, until her breathing had subsided into a calmer, more regular rhythm, the dinning of the burglar alarms had faded away, the spiders had retreated to their subterranean home and Rachel realized that, apart from the sobbing of Grace and Sophia, the world was now empty and silent.

19

Alison was not thinking about anything in particular. She sat in the armchair at the bay window, watching the sunlight throw elaborate shadows across the curlicued red-and-yellow patterns of the old-fashioned carpet. It was odd how well she remembered this carpet, given that she hadn’t seen it for more than twelve years. The house itself hadn’t changed much. Beverley hadn’t changed much, for that matter — except for Number 11, Needless Alley, which, it turned out, had been shorn of its leafy aviary, and was now home to a prosperous, well-dressed family, who had tidied up the garden and fitted a new front door and repainted the window frames. What had become of Phoebe? Nobody seemed to know.

Rachel’s grandmother seemed cheerful enough on the surface — could not have been more delighted, really, to welcome Alison and Rachel back to her home, even if was just for a day — but there was no escaping the fact that her husband’s absence now filled every room, settled everywhere like a film of dust, in a way that his presence never had. Gran herself, under the strain of this absence, had almost buckled, become wraith-like. She passed through doorways, from kitchen to living room, from bathroom to landing, as silently as a ghost. Even now, as Alison sat in the sunshine daydreaming, she did not even notice that Gran had entered the room, and quietly settled herself on the sofa. Not until she heard her say:

‘Rachel was telling me that your mum’s had a stroke of luck.’

Startled, Alison turned round. ‘That’s right.’

‘What happened?’

‘Well …’ After telling so many people, so many times, over the last few weeks, Alison still found the story hard to believe. ‘She was coming home on the bus one afternoon, just like any other day, when the phone rang, and it was this woman she’d been on TV with. Danielle Perry. She’s a sort of singer, actress … I don’t know what you’d call her really.’

‘I know who you mean,’ said Gran. ‘She’s ever so pretty.’

‘And she said she wanted to record one of Mum’s songs. The one she’d heard her sing in the jungle when they did that show together. “Sink and Swim”. So that’s what she’s done. And it’s selling really well. In the charts and everything.’

‘I’m so glad,’ said Gran. ‘Will she make some money out of it?’

‘Yeah, she already has. Quite a bit in fact.’

‘Everybody deserves a bit of luck now and again. Jim used to do the Lottery, you know. Every week. He never won a thing.’ She was looking at the chair in which Alison was sitting, but it was as if she didn’t see her at all. ‘I can picture him now, sitting right there, crossing out the numbers. That was his favourite chair. His favourite spot.’

Alison started to get up. ‘You can sit here if you want, Mrs —’

‘No, don’t be silly. You stay where you’re comfortable. Enjoy the sunshine. Best time of the day to sit there.’

She was perched on the edge of the sofa, clutching a mug with ‘World’s Best Gran’ written on it, a Christmas present from Rachel long years ago.

‘In the mornings, too. Always sitting there, he was, when I came down. He was waiting for the paper boy, you see.’

Alison nodded, and smiled. She didn’t know what to say.

‘That was how the day used to start,’ said Gran. ‘I’d come down. Put the kettle on. Make the tea.’

She smiled, faintly. The recollection seemed to warm her.

‘Then the paper would come. He’d get it first. I’d make some breakfast, get him his cereal. Then we’d have it in the kitchen together.

‘Then he’d go on his computer. He loved his computer. That was the best thing he ever bought. He’d do the letters, and the bills, whatever needed doing.

‘I’d stay downstairs, while he was doing that. Start the crossword.

‘Middle of the morning, we’d have another cup of tea. Together. In here. That was his chair, the one you’re in. Then I’d go out to the shops.

‘We had lunch in the kitchen. Just soup, normally. Tomato for me, mushroom for him. He’d put the radio on. Always wanted to hear the news at one o’clock.

‘Then if the weather was good, we’d go out in the garden. He was proud of the garden. We never had a gardener, never had anyone to help. Right to the end, we’d do it ourselves. Trim the borders and keep the hedge tidy.

‘Then he’d come inside for a sit-down. That chair where you are now. He always knew where to catch the sunshine.

‘I’d want to watch television later on. Quiz shows and things. He didn’t like them so much, so he’d go back upstairs, on his computer. We weren’t in the same room, but I always knew he was here, always knew he was in the house.

‘Dinner at six. We never had it much later than that. Neither of us liked fancy food. Fried mushrooms were his favourite, he’d like anything with them. Just mushrooms on toast, we’d have sometimes.

‘We never agreed what to watch on television. He liked the news, current affairs, anything political. I liked plays and comedy programmes, something to make you laugh, but they don’t make such good ones any more, do they?

‘He had a whisky at night, just before he went to bed. There was no harm in it. He only ever had the one. It helped him sleep.

‘He went to bed early. Always in bed before eleven. He’d put the radio on, not very loud. I think he just liked to listen to the voices. I’d be down here. Still trying to finish the crossword, probably. I couldn’t hear anything from upstairs, but it was enough. It was enough just to know he was there.’

She fell silent. Hunched over her mug, she wasn’t crying, but she looked frail, and tired. The afternoon sunlight fell upon her face, finding wrinkles, illuminating the folds of skin at her throat.

Alison stood up and walked over to her. She put her arms around her, felt the brittleness of her bones beneath her jumper, leaned in, saw the whiteness of her scalp through the thinning, frost-coloured hair. She kissed the top of her head, a gentle, lingering kiss.

‘Rachel was calling for you,’ Gran said. ‘I think she needs your help.’

*

Rachel was sitting at the top of the plum tree, her face tilted towards the sun, enjoying the warmth of its rays upon her face. She loved sitting amidst the branches of this tree — had loved it ever since she was a child — with its view over the neighbouring gardens, the tidy patchwork of suburban life laid out beneath her, and in the distance, the monumental, greyish-cream towers of the Minster.

She looked down when Alison approached and said:

‘About time too. Where’ve you been?’

‘Chatting to your gran. Are you all right up there?’

‘Very comfortable actually.’

‘You’re not supposed to exert yourself.’

‘I’m fine. I’ve been fine for ages. I wish everybody’d stop worrying about me.’

And it was true. Rachel was looking healthier than she had looked for many weeks. She’d been living at home with her mother in the months since her discharge, and she was rested, and she was happy again. She had put it all behind her.

‘Come on, then,’ said Alison. ‘Those plums aren’t going to pick themselves. Chuck them down and I’ll catch them in the basket.’

‘Right you are.’

Rachel reached across to the furthest bunch. There had been another wonderful crop this year. They were purple and luscious, perfectly ripe, with soft powdery skins.

As she plucked the first one, a spider ran out from beneath it. She held out her arm, and allowed it to scuttle along the pale skin of her underarm until it had reached the neighbouring branch, where it ran off to safety. Rachel watched it disappear between the cracks in the bark. Then she threw the plum down to Alison.

‘Here, catch!’

They continued like this, throwing and catching, throwing and catching, for a minute or two, until Alison stopped and said:

‘Do you miss Jamie, Rache?’

‘A bit.’ She threw down another plum. ‘What about you, do you miss Selena?’

‘A bit.’

‘Well, if you ask me,’ said Rachel, ‘we’re better off single.’

‘Too right,’ said Alison. ‘You know what, though?’ she added, a thought having just occurred to her. ‘Perhaps we should be a couple.’

‘You and me?’ Rachel laughed dismissively. ‘Dream on,’ she said. ‘This lady’s not for turning.’

‘Suit yourself,’ said Alison. ‘I don’t fancy you anyway.’

Rachel laughed again, and plucked one more plum from a bunch of four. She took the fruit, rubbed it clean against her T-shirt and bit into it. The juice was deliciously sweet in her mouth. It was the taste of her childhood; the taste of home; the taste of autumn sunshine.

20

My name is Livia and I come from Bucharest. I have been living in London for more than five years, and my job is taking the dogs of very rich people for their daily walk.

But that is not all.

Strange things have happened in this part of London. Six people disappeared, and they have never been found. The police keep making enquiries, looking for connections. They came to interview me. But the real connection between these six people is something that they have never noticed.

They all had dogs.

I am Livia, and I come from Bucharest. I have lived in London for five years, and I know not just its streets, but also its secret places, above ground and below. None of these places is deeper, or more secret, than the place beneath the tall house in Turngreet Road, eleven floors beneath the ground, beneath the wine cellar and the vault and the swimming pool where the palm trees grow.

There is a tunnel. And beyond the tunnel there is a room. And there they hang, in the dark. Each one wrapped in a cocoon of silver threads. Watched over by the vengeful creature with the amber eyes.

My vengeance takes many forms. My body takes many forms.

We have a saying in my country, by the way: Dupǎ faptǎ şi rǎsplatǎ. Which means, measure for measure, or the biter bit.

If you understand the saying, you will understand my nature. I am not merciful. I am not just. I cannot be tamed. I attack whomever I want, and whatever I want.

I am not angry. I am anger itself.

You may feel pity for my victims. That is your choice. You may place your sympathies with them, or with me. That is your decision.

In the end, I believe, we are all free to choose.