1 A Dead Girl
The train was two carriages long in its entirety, with rattling single-glazed windows, and it wound its way contentedly along the country line at whatever speed it felt like. It stopped at every tumbledown station it passed through, and this one was so small—a half-length platform of pebble-dashed concrete, covered in ivy at one end and collapsing at the other—that Claire almost didn’t realize it was her stop. In the end it was Sophie who roused her from staring, unseeing, out the window.
“Hey,” she said, waving a hand in front of Claire’s face. “I think this is it.”
“Oh, shit!”
Claire grabbed the bags and clattered out onto the platform just as the engine revved up once more. They turned and watched the train chunter off into the gathering darkness, then took stock. The letters on the sign were starting to peel off, but this was Wilbourne Major all right.
“Ohmigod,” Soph commented as Claire shrugged on her coat. “This place really is in the middle of nowhere.”
Claire turned ’round to look at her. Soph was in her usual bright turquoise velour tracksuit—Claire had almost forgotten what she looked like in anything else—the matching jacket and bottoms separated by a sliver of almost luminous midriff. Her chestnut curls were swept back into a high ponytail, and she had a few sparkly mini hair clips in the shape of butterflies decorating the sides of her head. In fact it looked as if a giant butterfly had landed in the October gloom. Claire was struck, as she was more and more now that she was entering her thirties, by the strong protective urge she felt toward Sophie.
“Aren’t we getting picked up? Where the fuck is the car?” Soph swore a lot—like, a lot a lot.
“Dunno.” Claire checked her phone. “I haven’t got any signal, of course. Figgy said she’d be here, though.”
“Let’s go this way…” Sophie walked off the platform and through the hedge behind it. It turned out that the car park joined almost directly onto the platform, and there was indeed a car waiting on the far side of it. It was a very shiny black Audi.
“Oof,” said Sophie as they walked toward it. “How rich are they, again? Maybe this weekend won’t be a total write-off.”
“I know, right?”
“Didn’t you say everyone who has an Audi is a dick, though?”
“Yeah, they totally are. If you ever see someone driving like an arsehole, it’s, like, always an Audi.”
“Isn’t that like saying everyone who’s rich is an arsehole?”
“I’m comfortable with that generalization,” Claire replied, picking at the loose threads in her coat. “But shh. That’s Figgy.”
“Sure, don’t want to offend your rich arsehole friend. LOL.” Sophie pronounced it el oh el.
Figgy Wellington-Forge opened the driver’s door and unfolded from the car like a sexy deck chair. She was very tall and was wearing a blue-and-white striped, figure-hugging woolen one-piece, as if she was off to an Alpine après-ski and not standing in mizzling rain in an English car park. She seemed exactly the same as she had been back in her university days with Claire.
“Dah-ling!” she cried, striding forward and bestowing Claire with four (four!) air kisses. “So good to see you.” Figgy was one of those people who stretched their vowels to breaking point, so what she actually said was “Seeeeeooo good to seeeyeeew!”
Claire slung the battered rucksack and carryall into the back seat, and Soph slid silently in after them. She sat in the middle because she liked to see the road. Claire sat in the front and then leaned back to fuss with the position of her rucksack, as a pretext to shoot Sophie a warning glance.
“Right!” Figgy exclaimed brightly. “If we get a bit of a wiggle on, we should get to the house in good time for dinner. Mummy is doing shepherd’s pie.”
Claire considered this. She’d had worse Friday nights than someone’s mum making her shepherd’s pie. It was getting truly dark now. When Claire looked in the rearview mirror all she saw was the occasional oncoming headlight sparkling off Soph’s lip gloss and her wide, dark eyes. Like those of most teenagers, Sophie’s emotions passed across her face as quickly and obviously as clouds in front of the sun, but sometimes she switched off entirely and became totally impassive. It was quite scary.
Figgy shivered and put the heaters on full blast, then broke the silence that Claire suddenly realized had gone on for some time. “So! How was your journey? God. It. Is. A. Nightmare getting down here, isn’t it?”
Claire opened her mouth to agree—the trip from London had in fact taken the entire afternoon and a good portion of the evening—but Figgy didn’t wait for an answer. She carried on chatting almost nonstop, while driving with the speed and abandon of someone who thinks they are a very good driver.
The car barreled through the village of Wilbourne Major along back roads to Wilbourne Duces (an even smaller village, which seemed more like a collection of houses around a pub and a postbox), and out into narrow lanes that twisted through fields. Claire found an opening eventually.
“Who’s going to be here for the weekend, then? If you don’t mind me asking,” she said.
“Well,” replied Figgy, intermittently taking her hands off the wheel to count off on her fingers, “it’s going to be almost all the family. There’s Nana, obviously. She’ll be hard to miss, she’s the old lady in the wheelchair. Eighty-four on Sunday! Then there’s Mummy and Daddy—Clementine and Hugh to you, I suppose. My sister-in-law, Tuppence, is here, too. She’s married to my oldest bro, and brought their kid, Alex, along. Oh, and Basher’s here, of course. He’s the middle brother and he used to be a proper police detective, but he totally quit after the party last year. Bit of a sore spot with the ’rents, so maybe don’t ask about it. Actually a huge sore spot. Massive drama.”
“Sorry, did you say ‘Basher’?”
“Ye-e-e-s! Sebastian, really, but nobody calls him that. I’m sure you met him. He came to a party at halls once.” Claire vaguely remembered a grave, blond young man with gray eyes eating all the Chilli Heatwave Doritos at a weekend pregame before what was definitely not a pub crawl for Figgy’s birthday (because pub crawls were unsanctioned by the uni, ever since a first-year chem student got alcohol poisoning).
“That’s a load of people,” said Soph, who always kept track better than Claire. She often had to give Claire name prompts. “Especially if more are turning up for the main party tomorrow.”
“It sounds like heaps, but it’s actually less than last year,” said Figgy. “Is it a problem?”
“Nah,” said Claire. “I’ve, um, had bigger groups.” This was in fact untrue, but there was no reason to tell the truth.
“Gosh, it’s so amazing you could come, you know—you really saved my bacon. Usually we take turns to arrange entertainment for the family get-togethers, and I totally forgot it was my go this time. But when I ran into you, I was just like: Oh. My. God! Perfect for Halloween, you know? You look fabulous, by the way,” Figgy added, lyingly.
Claire was in the middle of what was turning out to be an indefinitely long lean patch. She was wearing battered trainers with holes in the heels, a pair of black jeans that were so worn through they were gray, and a fifteen-year-old wool coat over her one nice winter jumper, in deference to the fact they were visiting a rich family. Her dyed black hair was showing about three inches of mousy roots, in contrast to Figgy’s perfect white-blond French plait. Figgy wasn’t totally unkind. This hadn’t stopped Claire asking for a fee about 150 percent higher than her usual rate, to which Figgy had readily agreed. So readily that Claire realized she should have plumped for 200 percent.
“Yeah,” she said, offering a smile. “It should be good. It’s a big old house, right?”
“Mmm! It has wings. Grade Two listed, because of the library. Of course, really it all belongs to Nana. She keeps joking that she’s going to change her will and have Mummy and Daddy out on their ear. They’ve properly rowed about it a few times, so I hope it doesn’t kick off in front of you. That would be so embarrassing! It’s just, you know, such an expensive old place to run, and I think Nana is worried that Mummy and Daddy are struggling. But honestly, Mummy would rather sell a kidney than that house.”
There was a pause as Figgy changed up a gear, releasing the clutch so abruptly that Claire jerked forward about six inches and heard one of the bags in the back fall off the seat.
“Whoops! Anyway, you don’t need to worry about all that. It’s a lovely place, really. I think the house is a couple of hundred years old or something. And the land used to have a monastery, so there are some ruined bits of wall and things that are much older. That’s why the house is still officially called the Cloisters.”
“There’d better not be any grim dead monks hanging about,” interjected Sophie from the back.
“There’s supposedly heaps of ghosts,” said Figgy happily. “Including this very creepy monk. Every time there’s a death, he’s meant to appear to the next member of the family who’s going to pop their clogs! Although nobody has ever actually seen him—at least not for hundreds of years. Monty made Tristan dress as the monk and hide in my wardrobe once, though, the beast.”
She gave no explanation of who either Tristan or Monty was. Claire imagined some boisterous cousins who visited every summer to have adventures, like the extremely smug children from the Famous Five. Boys in knee shorts and long socks who said “Rather!” and drank loads of ginger beer and lemonade to wash down doorstep-size ham sandwiches.
Figgy suddenly swerved right, onto a neat dirt road that sloped downward. Unidentifiable trees knotted their arms together overhead. The car began scrunching over gravel, and Claire got a glimpse of an imposing gray stone portico before Figgy swung around the side of the building and came to a stop at the back. There were lights on here—Figgy explained that the family spent most of their time in and around the old kitchen.
“All these bits used to be for, you know, looking after the house,” she said as she got out of the car. “Pantries, and rooms for some of the important servants, that sort of thing. It’s been converted into the family home, so the rest of the place can be used for”—Figgy waved her hands vaguely—“weddings and corporate away days and shooting parties, and so on.”
She led them through a heavy green wooden door, which opened directly into a large room with a flagstone floor and whitewashed walls. Claire was immediately disoriented by the bright light, the explosion of savory smells, and an assault of loud hooting from the family. It was a kind of wordless, elongated vowel noise in place of an actual greeting, to herald their arrival.
A shorter, squatter, older version of Figgy bustled over, though where Figgy’s skin was a delicate white porcelain color with perfect blush cheeks, this woman was more bronzed, as if she spent most weekends gardening. She had a perfect feathery blond bob and a deep pink cardigan with a string of neat pearls hanging around her neck, but she also had a powerful welly-boots aura. This was not just a mum. This was an M & S mum.
“Hellooooo, dahlings! I’m afraid we couldn’t wait to eat, but there’s plenty left,” said—presumably—Clementine, giving out air kisses that left a strong rose-scented perfume in their wake. “I’ll make up some plates. Come in, come in! Say hello. Hugh was just going into the other room to watch the rugger.” Here Clementine gave an exaggerated eye roll, as if to intimate that they were all girls here—ha, men and their balls!
“That woman never met a Laura Ashley print she didn’t like,” said Sophie, talking quietly in Claire’s ear. “I bet she has a knitting circle of dearest friends and hates every one of them. I bet she has a plan to kill each of them and get away with it.”
Sophie had a habit of being unkind about people when she first met them (and also after she’d first met them), but in this case Claire had to admit she was right. Clementine had an intensity to her kindness that hinted at a blanket intensity to all her actions.
They paused to look around. The room they were in was clearly the old kitchen but had been converted to an all-purpose family room. It had a high ceiling hung with bunches of dried flowers and herbs, and was bright and warm. In front of the door where they’d come in were a couple of creaking armchairs, and a much-loved sofa faced a smoldering fire. A sturdy wooden table ran off to the left, taking up almost the whole length of the rest of the room, toward a large blue Aga at the far end. The table still held the remnants of a family meal, as well as a few remnants of family, who were getting up to be introduced.
In contrast to his wife’s crisp consonants, patriarch Hugh’s voice was a kind of Canary Wharf foghorn. It went well with his vigorous handshake and his job “in finance.” He had a ruddy complexion, the pinkish red inflammation of a white man who drank a lot of red wine and ate a lot of red meat. His watery blue eyes squinted out of a once handsome face that was losing its definition at the edges, like a soft cheese.
“Hugh looks like a man who never misses an episode of Question Time,” murmured Sophie, cocking an eyebrow.
Claire bit on the inside of her cheek and managed to give a noncommittal “mm-hmm” in response to Hugh’s greeting. He was folding up a broadsheet paper. There was a story with the headline “I Don’t Care What the Wokerati Say, I Won’t Stop Putting Mayonnaise in My Welsh Rarebit,” and she looked at this in disbelief and confusion for long enough that Hugh noticed.
“Ridiculous, isn’t it? Can’t do or say anything these days. Corporate political correctness is running amok everywhere, and you can’t even bloody eat food how you want!” he said, misreading her expression. “Now people are complaining that if you make rarebit with mayo, it’s cultural appropriation! Can you believe it?”
Claire considered the best way to answer this.
“No,” she said. “I cannot believe people are doing that.” She was aware that (a) she would probably fall into this newspaper’s definition of wokerati, and (b) if she was able to conceal this from Hugh like a ratfuck coward, she might be able to get a bonus for good behavior on top of her already-inflated fee.
“ ‘Putting some mayo in your Welsh rarebit’ sounds like a sex thing anyway,” commented Soph. “Newspaper columnists are all perverts.”
Claire bit the inside of her other cheek. Fortunately, this conversation was rescued by the introduction of a third new family member. Hugh gave an awkward side-arm hug to the newcomer, a woman in her forties. “This lovely creature is Tuppence. M’boy Monty, my eldest, had the good sense to tie her down!”
Everything about Tuppence was meek: meek ponytail, a swathe of meek pashminas and layered cottons in various browns, and a meek, limp handshake. Even the cold she appeared to have was meek. She kept mopping her nose with tissues that were overflowing from her sleeves, rather than blowing it once, to have done with it.
But when she said, “It really is nice to meet you!” Claire decided Tuppence was her favorite person in the world. “My husband can’t be here this weekend,” she said, answering a question that Claire had not in fact asked. “He and Tristan are working on an important case at their firm.”
“Er, sorry—who is Tristan?”
Figgy elbowed in and took Claire’s coat. “Sorry, should have said, darling. Tris is my youngest bro, youngest of the four of us. He’s an absolute brat, honestly.”
“They’re both lawyers at Monty’s firm in London,” said Tuppence. “But we’ll have to make do without them this time, I suppose.”
“Interesting,” whispered Sophie, close to Claire’s ear. “Tuppence actually sounds quite pleased to be rid of Monty. This family is definitely going to turn out to be a mess, I love it. LOL.”
“Most families are a mess,” replied Claire, with an apologetic grimace. “Uh, I mean…um, organizing events for families, you know—a nightmare.”
To Claire’s surprise, Tuppence covered her mouth at this and looked at the ceiling. “As long as we don’t put mayonnaise in the rarebit,” she said as she looked back at Claire. Claire couldn’t have sworn to it, but she thought Tuppence might have winked.
That seemed to be all the family present in the kitchen. Of Nana, Tuppence’s child, or the improbable Basher, there was currently no sign. Clementine reappeared, putting down a loaded plate and leading Claire to sit at the table. Sophie stuck her tongue out at the back of Clem’s head and declared that she was going to look around—which meant roaming the house to nose through as much of people’s private lives as possible.
“So, Claire!” said Hugh, who had conjured a bottle of wine from nowhere. “Last name Voyant, yes? HA!”
Claire loaded an exploratory forkful of pie as Figgy sat down next to her. “Nope. Hendricks. Good one, though.” This was her polite stock response to a joke she had heard about a million, billion times.
Hugh was struggling manfully with the corkscrew, and Clementine took the bottle without speaking and opened it for him. Her expression was dispassionate.
“Terribly exciting, though,” said Clementine, giving a jovial little shrug. “Very unusual kind of entertainment to do, you know. I was really interested when Figgy said she’d hired you.”
“Mm-hmm. This pie is really great, thank you,” said Claire, shoveling it down. She was quite hungry because she’d only had a thing of Super Noodles for lunch before she got on the train. In contrast, Figgy was taking small and delicate mouthfuls and savoring each, as if she were a judge on MasterChef.
“Claire and I were at university together, d’you remember me saying, Mummy?” said Figgy. “And I ran into her and, when she told me her job, I thought it would be so quirky and spooky. I was only saying to Claire in the car, it’s perfect for Halloween. Didn’t I say that, Claire?”
“Yes, you did. And yeah, this is usually quite a good time of year for me.”
Claire noticed that everyone in the room was sort of hanging around, watching her. It was a strange feeling. She didn’t think they were trying to be rude, but it seemed a bit like they were privy to a rare zoological exhibit. Just as she thought of them as common or garden posh dullards, Claire realized that they saw her as the lesser-known drab weirdo. It wasn’t that people didn’t quite often think she was weird, but they were usually more subtle about it; or, having hired her, were more engaged with the weirdness. And she had seen enough horror films to know that a bunch of upper-class people inviting you to their family home for Halloween weekend, and then examining you like some sort of game bird, was a potential recipe for disaster. She looked around, but Sophie was still off exploring.
Perhaps realizing that everyone was staring at Claire in silence, Clementine abruptly announced that there wasn’t a pudding, but there was fruit, which made Hugh grumble under his breath. He sidled off to watch the rugby. Figgy finished eating and started helping her mother to tidy up, which made Claire feel awkward. She concentrated on her plate instead. Her wineglass kept magically refilling as she ate, and soon she was feeling quite hot and sick from all the carbs and alcohol that she had hoofed into her stomach.
As if sensing this, too, Clementine led her away to a neat twin bedroom. Clementine’s powers of observation and/or telepathy were unnerving, but the fact that it was a twin room pleased Claire, because it meant there was enough room for Sophie to keep herself entertained. All the furnishings were cream or white, and the walls and ceiling were a bit higgledy-piggledy. The walls didn’t join up where you’d expect them to—like something a child had tried to make out of Play-Doh. There was a little en suite shower and toilet, though, which was probably more complex than a Play-Doh house would allow. It was very nice. A lot nicer than her flat in London.
Claire opened the window to cool down and suppress her nausea. She was leaning out, collecting deep lungfuls of clean country air, when she realized it wasn’t as clean as she’d expected. The dense and delicious smell of weed was wafting through the autumn night. Then she caught the sound of quiet talking and, remarkably, Sophie laughing.
It took her a few minutes of self-consciously creeping around cold corridors in the dark, but eventually Claire found a heavy curtain that was concealing a set of French doors. On the other side of these was a discreet patio, with a couple of tables and chairs and one of those big garden wood-burner things.
Sophie was staring into the flames. Next to her, a teenager with blue hair was clutching an asymmetrical black cardigan around themself and holding about two-thirds of a massive joint.
“All right?” said the teenager, ...
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