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When Viv wakes the next morning to the sound of Cleo showering down the hall, she lies in bed staring at the ceiling for a while, thinking about Ruby and the black hole of memories she’d fallen into the night before. The little white Essex cottage, their sudden escape to London, the decade spent at Unity House. She looks at her alarm clock and, remembering it’s Saturday and that Cleo has a football match she needs driving to, groans and pulls herself from the bed. She drank too much again last night. After Cleo had gone to bed she had thought about Monday’s anniversary and one glass of wine had turned into another and then another, as they so often do. Wrapping a dressing gown around herself, she stumbles downstairs to the kitchen where she finds the empty wine bottle and shoves it guiltily in the recycling box with the others.
As she makes herself coffee she gives herself a mental shake. Ruby’s death was so long ago; they had survived it, both she and Stella. Jack Delaney had been found guilty and sent to prison, and that was that. It was all in the past.
She’d been in her thirties when he’d finally been released, thanks to an extra eight years added to his sentence for an attack on a fellow prisoner so vicious it had left his victim in a coma, permanently blinded in one eye. On Jack’s release, Viv had avoided all news stories about him, even taking Cleo, ten by then, on holiday to France in case the papers decided to print his picture. She had only vague memories of what he looked like: dark hair, a thin, cruel mouth and heavy brow, but nothing substantial; his image had been banished to the part of her brain where her darkest terrors lived and the shadowy figure who stalked her nightmares was frightening enough without furnishing it with the details a photograph would provide. Her mother later heard he’d emigrated to Canada, and though that should have given Viv comfort, it hadn’t, not really: as long as he was alive she would fear him.
She carries her coffee across to the table and sits down. A pale morning sun casts its glow across the parquet flooring and the kitchen has a gratifyingly warm and cosy feel. This morning, she thinks with satisfaction, her house looks exactly like the tasteful, comfortable, middle-class home she’d spent the past fifteen years and an awful lot of money trying to create. In fact, every room of her pretty Georgian townhouse is a testament to the hours spent lovingly restoring each period detail, or trawling auctions and eBay for the perfect antique lampshade or table or chair. A million miles from the little white cottage, the large and chaotic commune – the sort of home where nothing bad ever happened and never would. A perfectly nice, perfectly safe place in which to raise her daughter.
She hears Cleo come clattering down the stairs seconds before she bursts into the room, stuffing her football kit into her bag. Her curls still wet from the shower, she takes one look at her mother and wails, ‘Oh Mum! You’re not even dressed! You’re supposed to be taking me to footie!’
Guiltily Viv jumps to her feet. ‘OK, OK! I’ll be ready in two minutes. Jeez, relax!’ She gulps her coffee and hurries from the room.
Five minutes later as they are leaving the house, Cleo impatiently rushing ahead, Viv spies their new neighbour, Neil, cutting his hedge. Not having the heart to ignore his eager smile, she gives him a wave, ‘Hello there!’ He’s a slightly chubby man who looks to be in his late forties with badly dyed brown hair and a rather grating laugh, but he’s harmless enough; a welcome antidote at least to the self-satisfied hipsters who’d descended on the area in droves in recent years.
Ignoring Cleo, who’s scowling and rolling her eyes, she says, ‘You’re up and at ’em early, Neil. How’s it all going with the renovations?’
‘Oh, slowly, slowly, you know how it is.’
‘You’ve done wonders with the place.’ She glances up at the sash windows he’s recently installed. It is, in fact, quite astonishing what he’s managed to do in such short a time. Before he’d moved in, the property had belonged to a sweet elderly Cypriot woman who, due to ill health, had allowed the house to fall to rack and ruin over the fifty years she’d lived there. By the time she’d died it had been almost derelict. Shortly after the funeral her daughter had put it on the market for a price Viv had thought extortionate, considering the work that needed doing to it, and it had languished on the market for over eighteen months before suddenly it had sold, to the entire street’s surprise, for the full asking price. A few months later, Neil had moved in.
He’s looking at her hopefully. ‘You and Cleo will have to come round for a cup of tea sometime. I can show you what I’ve done inside.’
‘We’d love to,’ she says, beginning to edge away. ‘That’d be great.’ She smiles apologetically, ‘I’m afraid we’ve got to run now, footie practice, but let’s definitely do that soon, thank you.’
She feels him watching her as they get into the car. Oh, God, does he fancy her? She doesn’t really get that vibe, though she’s not quite sure what vibe she does get, exactly. Perhaps he’s just a bit lonely: she never sees any friends dropping by, no one who looks like family for that matter either. She finds herself hoping very much that he doesn’t fancy her; there’s something about his high-pitched giggle, his eager-puppy eyes that creeps her out a little. Immediately she feels a twinge of self-reproof: You’re not exactly beating them off with a stick yourself, Viv. And then she thinks of Shaun and cringes.
There’s a short warm-up before the match starts so Viv decides to wait in the car. The icy rain that had begun to fall on the journey over there begins to pick up pace and she turns up the heater, savouring these last moments of warmth and dryness before she’s forced out into the freezing cold to watch her rosy-cheeked daughter run around the sodden sports field, happy as a pig in mud. Cleo certainly hadn’t inherited her love of sport from her.
She changes the CD she’d been listening to and idly thinks about what to cook for Samar and Ted later when they come over for lunch – something she’d organized to distract herself from the looming anniversary of Ruby’s death. Before long her thoughts turn to the café and the refurb she’s planning, and she feels a pleasurable tug of excitement.
She sometimes has to pinch herself when she considers how well her life has turned out. A beautiful daughter, her own house and business. For a terrifying time, it had seemed likely that she might not make it through her twenties alive – in fact, if it hadn’t been for Stella and Samar, she doubts she would have done.
In 1991, when she was fourteen, she had received completely out of the blue, a letter telling her that both her maternal grandparents had died and left all their money to her. An astonishing sum of £500,000, to be held in trust until her eighteenth birthday. Half a million pounds! She had called for her mother, remembering the journey they’d made to her grandparents’ beautiful home, senseless with grief and shock, in the aftermath of Ruby’s murder. How her mother had told her, ‘There’s nothing for us here.’
Stella had read the letter in silence. ‘Well,’ she said neutrally, when she’d finished. ‘Looks like you’re going to be rich.’
‘But why didn’t they leave it to you?’ Viv had asked incredulously. ‘They didn’t even know me!’
Stella dropped the letter to the table and said, ‘I don’t want their bloody money.’
In the silence that followed they heard Margo walking to and fro in her bedroom above and Vivienne saw her mother’s whole bearing tense at the sound. ‘What happened between you and your parents?’ she asked her tentatively. ‘Why did they treat you so badly?’ It was a question she’d tried to ask her mother many times over the years, but had never received a satisfactory answer.
But to her surprise Stella said, ‘I didn’t do what they wanted – university, a career, a good marriage. I was so young when I fell pregnant with Ruby. I let them down. They couldn’t forgive me.’
‘And they punished you forever after?’ Viv said hotly. ‘Well, they were bloody bastards, then! I don’t want their money either!’
‘Take it.’
‘No way. Or if I do, we’ll share it.’
And though it had taken her a long time, eventually Stella had been persuaded, and at eighteen, Viv had found herself in the astonishing and very dangerous position of having more money than she knew what to do with. Now, as she waits for Cleo’s football match to start, she pushes the memory away. What had followed had been one of the darkest times of her life and wasn’t something she liked to dwell on.
After the muddy, wet and interminable football match, Viv and Cleo return home, Viv to make a start on lunch, Cleo to get straight on the phone to invite her friend Layla over. ‘To help me with my English essay,’ she explains, somewhat unconvincingly.
Viv’s peeling potatoes when Layla arrives. She pops her head around the door on her way up to Cleo’s room and Vivienne waves hello. ‘How’s it going, sweetheart? Nice to see you.’ Layla and Cleo have been friends since nursery school. She’s a slight girl, with neat tight cornrows, lavender-framed glasses and a terrifyingly high IQ. Layla holds strong views on everything from fracking to the Gaza Strip and isn’t afraid to air them. Though her parents – a jolly, extrovert couple from Mozambique – run a dry-cleaner’s and her older sister Blessing is training to be a beautician, Layla intends to be a human rights lawyer when she grows up, and Viv has absolutely no doubt whatsoever that this will happen one day.
‘Samar and Ted are coming over soon,’ she tells her. ‘Do you want to join us for lunch?’
Layla narrows her eyes. ‘Will it be vegan-friendly, Vivienne?’
‘Erm, no. No, I’m afraid it probably won’t.’
Layla looks at her severely through her glasses. ‘In that case, no thank you. I’ve been reading about the effects of meat consumption on the environment and frankly want no part of it.’
Viv smiles, and notices that Layla is carrying a small duffle bag. ‘What’ve you got in there?’
But before she can reply, Cleo appears and pulls her friend by the arm. ‘Come on, let’s go to my room.’
A moment later Viv hears Cleo’s door close and the stereo being switched on, and she relaxes, relieved that Cleo seems to have bounced back after the disappointing visit to her father’s a few weeks before. Mike had recently had a new baby with his girlfriend Sonia, and Cleo’s last visit had been her first introduction to her half-brother. She’d been quiet when she returned, and evasive to Viv’s gentle questioning. She absolutely doted on her dad, despite the myriad ways he’d let her down. Viv sighs and gets the chicken out of the fridge ready for roasting, shuddering when she remembers that had also been the weekend she’d slept with Shaun. Should have been grateful, saggy old bitch. Jesus. She shakes her head: she certainly knew how to pick them.
Upstairs, Layla is watching Cleo rummage through her duffle bag. ‘What do you want all this stuff for anyway?’ she asks her. ‘My sister will go crazy if she finds out I’ve taken it.’
Cleo pulls out a handful of cosmetics and looks at them in wonder. ‘I want you to take a picture of me, I’m sick of looking the way I always look. I’ve been watching YouTube videos on how to put this stuff on.’
Layla frowns. ‘But what’s the picture for?’
‘Just … OK, promise not to freak? I’ve been talking to this boy online, on the Fortnite forum, you know? His name’s Daniel and he sent me a picture of himself and he’s amazing. Now he wants one of me. And I don’t want to look like some stupid kid. I want to look cool.’
Layla’s unimpressed. ‘I think this is a very bad idea, Cleo. It’s highly likely that this Daniel person is what’s known as a catfish. They made us watch that documentary about it at school, remember?’
But Cleo only shrugs. Yes, he could be a fake, but she doesn’t think so, and in a way, it doesn’t really matter. It’s like a game she’s caught up in. She’s never going to meet him, so what’s the harm in it? It’s almost like getting lost in a film or a book, a fun, easy way to talk to a cute boy without the embarrassment of having to do it face-to-face. And she’s found she wants to be different, suddenly, from the same old Cleo who plays football and gets good grades and looks much younger than everyone else in her year. She’d heard a few boys at school talking about her as she walked past them a week or so ago, sniggering, saying she looked like a boy and had no breasts, that they wouldn’t touch her with a bargepole. And even though she knew deep down they were idiots, it had triggered something inside her, a restless anxiety that she was being left behind. She wished she could be more like Layla and not care, but the truth was she did. ‘I just want to try it,’ she says to her friend. ‘Will you help?’
Sighing, Layla picks up a tube of mascara and a lipstick, and shrugs her agreement, surprising both of them over the next twenty minutes by being a dab hand with it. ‘No idea why Blessing needs to go to college to learn how to do this stuff,’ she mutters, running some straightening irons through Cleo’s hair. ‘It’s not exactly rocket science.’
Cleo smiles and listens to the sounds of her mother preparing lunch downstairs. She thinks about how over the past few days her mum’s face has taken on a familiar, distracted look. Every year at this time it’s the same: the sadness of an awful, unimaginable thing that had happened a lifetime ago to someone she had never known sweeps through their house, pressing itself against the window panes, drifting up between floorboards, dimming the lights and chilling the air. And this year, like all the ones before it, she’d had no idea what to say to make her mum feel better.
‘Do this,’ Layla instructs her, pushing her lips into a pout as she brandishes a shade of lipstick called Hubba Hubba!
As Cleo obeys, her thoughts turn to her recent visit to her dad’s house, how much she’d been looking forward to meeting her new brother, how when she’d arrived it had been nothing like she’d thought it would be.
Her dad and Sonia seemed to exist in an exhausting cycle of nappies and feeding and sleepless nights, beset with anxieties about sniffles and temperatures and something called colic, something called croup. The baby had been clamped to Sonia’s breast for what seemed like hours on end and Cleo had felt in the way, an inconvenience. When she talked, her voice was too loud, her movements too clumsy. When she’d finally been allowed to hold Max, he had screamed so hard that Sonia had taken him back with a sigh of exasperation and she’d started to cry herself, only for her dad to say, ‘For goodness’ sake, Cleo, don’t you start; you’re a big girl now, grow up!’
And despite his exhaustion, she’d seen how her dad gazed down at his new son, felt the love that bound the three of them so tightly, and something inside her had hurt, as though the more warmth there was in their little house, the colder she felt inside, and she’d wanted to go home to London, feeling guiltily relieved when her dad drove her to the station and tiredly waved her off.
‘Right,’ says Layla briskly. ‘All finished.’ Eagerly Cleo goes to look at herself in the mirror and grins in amazement. Her hair is sleek and sophisticated rather than its usual mess of curls; the eyeliner, mascara and lipstick Layla’s used has definitely made her look prettier as well as older – at least fifteen, she thinks. She runs to her mother’s room and returns wearing a red, scoop-necked T-shirt, then again gazes at her reflection in the mirror, delighted with herself. ‘OK, now take a picture of me,’ she says excitedly.
Later, when Layla has left, Cleo sends the picture straight to Daniel. His response is almost instant – Wow, you’re so beautiful! – and happiness fizzes inside her. Then she hears her mum calling from downstairs. ‘Cleo? Sammy and Ted are here. Come down!’
G2g xx, she writes, then runs to the bathroom and scrubs the make-up from her face, before returning the T-shirt to her mother’s closet and heading for the stairs.
In the kitchen, Samar is telling Vivienne and Ted a story about a well-known theatre actress he’d once worked with. A long career in stage management has provided him with a seemingly endless supply of salacious gossip, but even by his standards, today’s tale is pretty hair-raising. ‘But I mean, how is that even possible?’ Viv muses when he’s finished. ‘And with a Great Dane, for Christ’s sake?’ She sighs wonderingly and pours Samar a glass of wine, then offers the bottle to Ted. ‘How about you, Ted? You joining us today?’
‘Oh, better not, I’m on a diet.’ He pats his round stomach regretfully.
When Viv turns back to Samar she’s surprised to see the wistfulness in her friend’s eyes as he gazes over at Ted. It occurs to her suddenly that they’d both been quieter than usual today and she wonders if they’ve had a row. Samar has always been uncharacteristically unforthcoming about their relationship. When he’d first introduced him to her she’d been dubious; Ted hadn’t seemed the most obvious match for her friend. While Samar was skinny as a whippet, habitually dressed in black and had a sense of humour verging on depraved, Ted had a lilting Welsh accent, was balding and overweight, and favoured comfortable clothes in various shades of beige. He’d always struck her as a bit staid for someone as extrovert as Samar.
She also couldn’t help feeling that Ted didn’t entirely approve of her and Samar’s close friendship. He often avoided joining them whenever they got together, sending Samar with an apologetic excuse that never quite felt authentic. When he did appear she sometimes had the nagging sense that he was there under sufferance and couldn’t help wonder if he might not like her very much. She takes a sip of her wine and tries to push the thought away. Samar is clearly head over heels, things have moved fast between them and on the whole they both seem happy together. The slight atmosphere today is probably down to a lover’s tiff, she decides, as she catches Samar’s eye and smiles. She gets to her feet and, sliding the chicken from the oven, bastes it with sizzling fat before slamming it back in. ‘So, tell me about this trip to Paris,’ she says to Ted. ‘Can’t believe you’re whisking him off again.’
‘What can I say? I like to spoil him.’
‘God, you lucky sod,’ she says to Samar enviously.
Ted shakes his head. ‘I’m the lucky one.’ At this she sees Samar beam with pleasure, whatever tension there’d been between them apparently forgotten.
Samar and Viv had met aged fourteen when he joined Deptford Green Comprehensive in Year 9. Both of them had been easy targets for the school’s bullies – Vivienne for wearing handmade clothes courtesy of Soren, having her hair cut by Hayley with the kitchen scissors, and for living in a house with ‘a bunch of weirdo lezzers’ that ‘didn’t even have a telly’, and Samar for being Pakistani, gay and seemingly unapologetic about both. Together they’d bunk off to hang out in Nunhead cemetery where they’d sit within its vast, overgrown sprawl amidst the broken angels and mausoleums, smoking spliffs pilfered from Hayley’s stash and pouring over copies of The Face and i-D, dreaming about what better, cooler, well-dressed people they’d be when they grew up.
Samar never said much about his home life but it hadn’t taken Viv long to get the gist – three sisters and an unhappy mother in a two bedroom flat in New Cross, a father who was perpetually drunk and full of a nameless rage that he liked to take out on his skinny, rebellious son. Samar had loved the commune, loved Stella with a fervour close to hero worship. He’d become one of her original devotees, first in the long line of waifs and strays she’d counsel over the years, and even now remained one of her most ardent fans.
Aged seventeen, in the mid-nineties, they’d discovered London’s gay scene, embracing every bar and club the city had to offer, returning faithfully every Saturday night to be transported to a world where neither Ruby’s death nor Samar’s dad could follow them.
When, after barely scraping through her A-levels, Vivienne inherited her grandparents’ money, life had been wonderful at first. Viv found them a flat to rent in Deptford and she and Samar partied by night and slept by day, their lives an exciting whirl of recreational drugs, booze and men. But then, suddenly, things had changed. Samar landed his dream job as a stagehand in the West End, and didn’t want to go out quite so much any more. He began to nag Viv about the drugs and drink she was consuming, the strange men waking up in their flat every weekend. In turn, she thought he was a boring, nagging hypocrite who needed to lighten up. Eventually, they’d had a major falling out. Samar had moved out of the flat and Viv had carried on partying without him.
And then, entirely out of the blue, or so it had seemed at the time, Vivienne, now twenty-two, had fallen into a darkness so thick and bottomless that she could find no way of dragging herself out. For weeks she’d stayed at home, sinking lower and lower, a sadness pressing on her chest that made her unable to eat or wash or countenance the world outside her flat. When she slept her dreams were plagued by horrors from which she’d wake breathless with fear, tears in her eyes, her sister’s name on her lips.
Finally, wanting to build bridges and concerned when she didn’t answer her phone, Samar had called around, using his old key to gain entry when there was no response to his knock. Within minutes he’d bundled Viv into a cab and taken her straight to Stella’s, and over the next year the two of them slowly helped put Vivienne back together. When Viv thinks back to that time she shudders to think what would have happened if Samar hadn’t rescued her, if her mum hadn’t been there to take charge.
It was a time in her life she never wanted to return to, especially since having Cleo. Sometimes though she feels the darkness like a black beast circling her, waiting for its chance to pounce. Only her need for alcohol remains from those dark days and nights of sex and booze and drugs; wine was the one thing she’d not managed to relinquish, not while her nightmares continued to haunt her.
The chicken out of the oven, Viv is about to call Cleo down to eat when Samar says quietly, ‘It’s the anniversary on Monday, isn’t it?’
She nods, touched that he remembers every year.
‘How’re you feeling?’
‘Oh, you know. I’ve no idea why I still get so upset every time. Why I can’t just move on. She died thirty-two years ago, for God’s sake.’
‘Have you never had therapy for it?’ Ted asks.
She glances at him. ‘No, but I’ve always had my mum to talk to, and you know how brilliant she is.’ Even as Viv makes this remark it occurs to her that Ted, in fact, hasn’t met Stella yet. Before he came on the scene she, Stella and Cleo would enjoy frequent Sunday lunches around at Samar’s flat, but that hadn’t happened in months. Again the worrying thought occurs to her that Ted, though perfectly polite to her face, might not quite approve of her and Samar’s closeness and she feels a lingering disquiet that the friendship that had survived since their schooldays might not endure if he tried to come between them.
But Ted merely nods. ‘Even so, maybe someone totally neutral wouldn’t be a bad idea.’
‘Oh, don’t bother,’ Samar tells him. ‘She won’t go. I’ve tried to talk her into it a billion times.’
Viv smiles and shrugs. The thought of talking to a stranger about her sister’s death has always made her feel intensely uncomfortable, though she’s not sure why. She’d been grateful that her mother had never insisted on it when she was young.
‘You sure you’re OK, though?’ Samar asks again, coming over and putting his arm around her.
She leans her head on his shoulder. ‘I hate this time of year.’
‘What you need is a bit of excitement in your life. How about that doctor guy from the café? Are you going to ask him out?’
She laughs. ‘No, Samar, I’m bloody not. For one thing, I don’t even know if he’s single.’
‘Well, get yourself on a few dating websites, then. It worked for me and Ted.’
‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘maybe you’re right.’ But her thoughts linger on the doctor, and she’s not sure what it is about him that intrigues her so, only that there’s something about his grave smile, the calm brown of his eyes that she can’t quite let go of.
Much later, after her guests have left and Cleo is sound asleep, Viv goes about turning off the lights and locking the front door. Outside, the November wind bounds and batters along the street, she hears a bottle rolling to and fro along the pavement, a dog’s distant bark. Before she goes to bed she glances in at Cleo sleeping before softly creeping away.
No matter how hard she tries not to think about it, her mind returns again and again to the day her sister died, a familiar niggling doubt worrying at the peripheries of her consciousness. This strange uncertainty is something that has dogged her all her life. Perhaps it was Jack’s continued assertion of his innocence – he had appealed three times against his conviction – or his family’s unwavering belief that she had lied, but she’s never quite been able to shake it off.
As she gets undressed she reminds herself of how badly Jack had treated Ruby, how both Morris Dryden and their neighbour Declan had said they’d seen him in their lane at the time of the murder. She reaches for her sleeping pills, wanting only oblivion. The right man had gone to prison; there could be no mistake.
She wakes to darkness, her head slow and foggy from the pill, to feel fingers gripping her shoulder and she jerks away in alarm.
‘Mum, wake up! Wake up, Mum, it’s OK, it’s only me.’
Sitting up, Viv gazes around her in confusion. ‘Cleo? What’s the matter?’
‘You were shouting in your sleep again.’
‘Oh, God, love, I’m sorry.’ She leans over and switches on the bedside light to find her daughter crouching by her bed, blinking in the sudden brightness.
‘It’s OK. You were really screaming. Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. I’m sorry, darling. I’m OK.’
Cleo straightens and yawns, her face swollen with sleep. ‘Sounded like a bad one this time.’
‘It was. Thanks for waking me, I’m so sorry I disturbed you. Go back to bed. I’m fine.’
When Cleo leaves, Viv waits for her heart to cease its frantic hammering. The nightmare had begun the way it always did. She’s a child again, sitting in the living room while Ruby and Jack argue in the room above. A slow dread creeps through her. She knows that her sister is about to die but she’s unable to move a muscle, to do anything at all to stop it. What happens next always varies; occasionally she’ll go to Ruby’s bedroom to see a dark faceless figure standing over her sister’s body, sometimes she’ll run from the house knowing that her sister’s killer is on her heels, his hand reaching out to grab her.
In tonight’s dream though, just as she’d heard her sister’s scream she’d looked up to find their old neighbour, Declan Fairbanks staring in at her through the living room window. For a moment she’d held his pale blue gaze before being hit by the overwhelming rush of fear that had caused her to scream out so loudly that she’d woken Cleo – and probably half the street too.
It was not the first time she’d dreamt of Declan; he often appeared in her nightmares, always with an accompanying feeling of disquiet. Sometimes she’ll dream that Morris Dryden is there too, his happy grin and rosy cheeks incongruous with her terror.
This, of course, is not surprising, tied as Morris and Declan are to that day, their witness statements playing a key role in Jack’s conviction. But she’s noticed lately that her unease when she dreams of Declan is laced with something else – a queasy kind of revulsion. She remembers little about him: a rather severe-looking man in his fifties, dark hair peppered with grey, very striking pale blue eyes. She has a dim recollection of him shouting at her once for kicking a ball at his window. Perhaps that’s where her aversion springs from, the childish memory of being chastised mixed with the general horror of Ruby’s death. Perhaps that was all it was.
For a long time she lies staring at the ceiling, only the street lamp below her window casting its weak glow upon the blackness. The wind has stopped; the world outside is silent now. But when at last she starts to drift off back to sleep, a sudden noise from the street jerks her back to full consciousness. What was that? Her window is open a crack and she lies very still, listening, until another sound from outside has her sitting up, suddenly alert. There it is again: feet shuffling on the pavement below, then the sound of someone clearing their throat. Her nostrils prickle as she detects the faint trace of cigarette smoke. Slipping from her bed she creeps to the window and looks out.
There is someone standing by her gate and she feels a jolt of shock when she realizes that it’s her mother’s boarder, Shaun. He’s looking away down the street, the red glow from his cigarette rising and falling as he takes a drag, and she quickly steps back from the street lamp’s glare. What on earth? She waits, heart pounding, until she hears him move off, his footsteps on the pavement gradually retreating, and when she dares to peer out once more she sees him rounding the furthest corner, before finally disappearing from view.
6 (#ulink_3f3307ef-e441-5db1-acec-461c47049bb4)
Vivienne’s disquiet continues throughout the weekend, no matter how hard she tries to distract herself. What the hell had Shaun been playing at? Was he stalking her now? The thought is as baffling as it is frightening. She knows that all of her mother’s guests are carefully vetted before they’re sent to her; that Stella’s never given anyone with a history of violence – or any other serious crime, for that matter – yet what did either of them really know about him? When her alarm wakes her on Monday morning these questions are still weighing heavily upon her as she heads for the shower.
Thirty minutes later she and Cleo hurry out of the house only for Viv to come to an abrupt halt before the door has closed behind them. ‘I’ve forgotten my phone. Get in the car,’ she says, handing Cleo the keys and turning back inside. ‘I’ll give you a lift to the bus stop.’ But when she reappears twenty seconds later, it’s to find Neil and Cleo in deep discussion at the gate.
