The Daughter's Secret

by Eva Holland

Genres: General Fiction; Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

A pupil. A teacher. A mother's worst nightmare An addictive novel of psychological suspense. A gripping crime thriller for fans of Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies and Louise Doughty's Apple Tree Yard. My daughter is a liar. A liar, liar, liar. And I'm starting to see where she gets it from. When Rosalind's fifteen-year-old daughter, Stephanie, ran away with her teacher, this ordinary family became something it had never asked to be. Their lives held up to scrutiny in the centre of a major police investigation, the Simms were headline news while Stephanie was missing with a man who was risking everything. Now, six years on, Ros takes a call that will change their lives all over again. He's going to be released from prison. Years too early. In eleven days' time. As Temperley's release creeps ever closer, Ros is forced to confront the events that led them here, back to a place she thought she'd left behind, to questions she didn't want to answer. Why did she do it? Where does the blame lie? What happens next? Readers love this gripping psychological thriller: 'Unputdownable' 'Compelling' 'Leaves its mark' 'Tense and emotionally charged'

Release date: August 13, 2015

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 321

Sample

I was forty-two years old when I stopped worrying. I don’t know why it happened then. Maybe it was the quietness of the almost-empty house or the way that one day melted into the next without Freddy to feed and argue with. Or maybe I had worried so much for so long that my neural pathways had been ground to dust and my brain could no longer make the leaps required to see the catastrophes waiting behind the acts of everyday life.

I noticed the change when I started to linger in sleep. Instead of waking before dawn, my eyes springing open to lock sights on the threats of the day, I would breach consciousness only with Dan’s alarm. Sometimes I went back to sleep, slipping into that limbo state in which dreams link arms with reality and the sound of Dan in the shower became the lash of rain or the thrum of an aeroplane cabin. I started to be late for morning classes; I was no longer the woman outside the lecture theatre five minutes before it opened, a black coffee clenched in a tense claw. I was the one who slid into the back of the room at ten past nine with a smile and a nod, the woman I had always envied.

Like tuning into the picture on an old television set, another way of living came into view. It grew in clarity every day. I once read an interview with an obese woman who had spent decades trying to lose weight. Her greatest wish, she said, was to live for a day in the body of a thin woman. I was like that woman but my wish had come true: I was living in the skin of a normal person, seeing the world through eyes untainted by panic.

At the same time that my anxiety dwindled, things around me started to settle. It was as if some mighty cosmic force had whispered shhhh and the fretting and striving that drove motion and action had diminished then ceased. The cogs of life continued to whirr: sleep was slept, food was eaten, walks were taken, books were read, but nothing significant – nothing that could be classed as a happening, an event – took place. Other people didn’t seem to have noticed. I asked some: Dan, Beatrice, Cam. I even asked Stephanie when she rang one evening, but she said she didn’t understand what I meant. Now, of course, I wonder whether she knew that things were only slowing down to gather strength for what was to come.

I should have known it couldn’t last.

It was at three o’clock in the afternoon on Thursday the twentieth of November when the beeping ring of the phone happened. I heard it as I shook off my coat and pushed the front door closed behind me, the smell of Cam still caught in the weave of my scarf. I knew it was Tanya before she had finished forming the first syllable of my name. Her voice had once been so welcome but on that afternoon, after years of silence – her silence – it was as unwanted as orange juice after toothpaste. It was the sound of the past, of things I had tried to forget.

‘Ros, I wanted to call you as soon as I heard,’ she said. She had never been one for small talk, which had seemed surprising for a police Family Liaison Officer. I remember waiting for her to come to the door the first time. I imagined cardigans, platitudes and coffee breath. I thought she would hold my cold, trembling hands with cold, trembling hands of her own. But that wasn’t what she did at all. Sometimes she reminded me to get dressed in the mornings. Sometimes she made Freddy’s sandwiches and took him to school. Sometimes she stood outside our door and snarled at the press pack until the clump of reporters and photographers retreated to the café at the end of the road, at least for a while. Was it any wonder that I had clung to her so tightly?

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘He’s getting out early. At the beginning of next month.’

‘Which month?’ Of course I knew what she meant but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

‘December, Rosalind. Eleven days from now.’ Her voice was calm and solid; I could have leant on it if I had let myself. I could picture her at her desk, her dark hair pulled back from her face, the pale scar that runs from her left ear to the corner of her mouth flexing as she spoke.

‘But they said seven years. At least seven years,’ I said. ‘It’s only been five and a half.’

‘He’s been a good boy and the prisons are bursting at the seams. There’s nothing we can do about it, no right of appeal.’ She sounded flat, resigned. Where had her anger gone? Her omnipotent bitterness? ‘Do you think Stephanie knows?’

‘No. I can’t see how she would.’

‘She doesn’t see him, then? There’s no contact at all? Letters? Visits? Phone calls?’

‘No, of course not. She got over it all. She moved on.’

‘I hope so, but you remember what she said back then, Ros. Where’s she living now?’

‘London. North, though. Near Finsbury Park.’

My ear was filled with the hiss of Tanya’s exhaled breath. ‘How far from the prison is that? Ten miles? Fifteen?’

Ten point three miles. I didn’t say anything.

‘Does she have a boyfriend?’

‘I don’t think she’d tell us if she did. That’s what they’re like, aren’t they? Too grown-up to share everything with their parents. She’s in her final year now and she’s on track for a First.’ I was trying to make the conversation normal, a catch-up between long-separated acquaintances, but Tanya wouldn’t let me.

‘Do you want me to tell her? I’ll ring her if you give me her number. There’s still support available to her. She might benefit from counselling to help her get used to the idea. I’ve got better resources now than when I was with the police.’ Tanya had left her old job to become Head of Victim Support for Hertfordshire. I glimpsed her on the local news from time to time. I always made myself change the channel.

‘I’ll tell her. It will be better coming from me. I’ll go up to London and take her out to lunch.’ I hadn’t done that for a while, hadn’t seen my daughter for nearly two months, I realised. She seldom came home, and since I had started letting the days and weeks flow over and around me instead of carefully measuring them out hour by hour, I had slipped out of the habit of going there. I had tried to arrange a family dinner for her twenty-first birthday earlier in the month but she had fobbed me off, telling me she was too busy and didn’t want to celebrate until the end of term. I hadn’t pushed it, had just sent a card and slipped an extra couple of hundred pounds into her bank account. ‘It will be…’ Was I really going to say that it would be nice? Of course it wouldn’t be nice. ‘It will be better for her,’ I said instead.

‘Well, do it soon. The press will get hold of this and she shouldn’t have to find out like that.’

‘Will they still care? Surely everyone’s forgotten by now, what with the war and the riots and the floods and everything.’ But how could they forget it? It was unforgettable.

‘Oh, they’ll still be interested all right. They chased that story for weeks and they won’t have forgotten what she said. They’ll want the big reunion or the big rejection and they won’t mind which. Star-crossed lovers to marry or pervert teacher gets his comeuppance. It’s all the same to them. It’s a good story either way, Ros.’

‘A story. Yes, I suppose it is. But there won’t be any big reunion.’ I wanted to end the phone call; I wanted it never to have started.

‘Let’s hope not. But tell her as soon as you can. The tabloids will be on the story the minute they get a sniff of his release and they have their sources too – better than mine most of the time – so that isn’t going to be long. I’m not involved officially any more, but I’ll be there for Stephanie if she needs me.’

What about me? I found myself wanting to say. Will you be there for me too? But she was already gone.

The telephone receiver slipped from my hand as I placed it back in its cradle. It clattered to the floor where I swore at it, angry words rising up to puncture the silence of the room. I fumbled with the Italian chrome coffee machine that squatted on the kitchen counter. It was Dan’s obsession, an ageing man’s toy. I suspected it of sneering at us behind our backs, mocking our provincial ways, our milky Americanos and china mugs. In that moment, its rank of shiny knobs irritated me so much that I pulled the emergency jar of instant granules from the cupboard under the sink.

I took my coffee into the empty cavern of the sitting room and started to prepare myself to ring Stephanie; I’m not sure when it had become something I had to gird myself to do. I imagined picking up the phone and dialling her number. I imagined her voice: as soon as she answered she would ask me how I was, what I was doing, how my course was going. In her bright, brittle telephone voice she would throw questions at me gently but insistently for ten minutes before I got a chance to ask her anything at all. Sometimes I would talk to her for half an hour and later, when Dan asked me whether she had any news, I could tell him almost nothing about her.

Once I had swallowed the last drops of cold coffee, I picked up the phone and dialled. It went straight to voicemail and I didn’t leave a message. Tanya had said eleven days. That was nearly two weeks. With my newly calibrated brain I could see that there was nothing to gain by worrying about it yet. I would ring her again tomorrow.

I was flicking through the photos I had taken with Cam on my camera’s tiny viewfinder when I heard the clatter of keys in the front door. I moved to stand beside the sink, turned the tap on full and stood there rinsing my mug as Dan passed through the house.

‘You’re back early. Everything OK?’ I said as we moved towards each other, drawn into a shallow kiss by the magnetic force of habit or love.

‘Everything’s fine. I just thought I’d come home and see you. I’m sorry I didn’t make it back last night.’

I shrugged. He had rung at half past nine the night before to tell me he had not yet left work and would stay in London rather than get the train home.

‘That hotel’s so bloody noisy,’ he said. ‘It was gone midnight by the time I left work and I was wide awake listening to the traffic by six this morning. Anyway, how are you?’

‘Fine. I’ve only been in for half an hour. I went into university and worked in the studio.’ I was wrapping a lie in a truth. I had been to the studio that morning, but I hadn’t come straight home. My camera lay on the table, a smear of dust on its fabric strap the evidence of my dishonesty. I moved to stand in front of it and block it from his view.

‘Did you get much done?’

‘A bit. I’m still not sure about showing my Empty Rooms paintings at the exhibition. Sometimes I think they’re clever and communicative and then I look at them again and they’re like something a teenager who thinks her parents don’t understand her might do for her art GCSE.’

‘I’m sure they’re great. You’ll have to tell me all about this pop-up exhibition of yours.’

‘I think “exhibition” might be too grand a term for a few art students’ scribblings hanging in an empty shop for half a day.’

‘Nonsense. It will be great. You just need a break from it. You know, to get some perspective. You need to, you know, let yourself breathe.’

He always said ‘you know’ a lot when he was nervous. What did he know? I felt Cam’s fingers on my jawbone, remembered the heat of his breath on my lips. ‘Yes. Maybe you’re right. That’s why I came home; I was just going round in circles. But you’re here, so now I’m glad I did.’

‘Let’s go out,’ he said. His words were fast, hard, rehearsed.

‘Out?’ We didn’t go out.

‘Yes. Out. Let’s go and drink wine by the river then stumble into town for a pizza. I want to talk nonsense and eat olives like we used to. It will help with your work, I promise. You need to relax.’ He stretched his arms out and pressed his fingers gently into the stiff muscles at the base of my neck, holding me still but distant. That was the moment to tell him about Temperley’s release. But Dan’s uncharacteristic nostalgia for what we had once been had infected me. Waiting another day couldn’t hurt.

‘It’s a bit cold for al fresco drinking,’ I said.

‘Nothing a coat and a scarf won’t fix. Come on.’

I ran upstairs to get my other scarf, the mauve one that I could wrap around myself three times; the one that didn’t smell of Cam.

It was a good night, unusual and illicit, like a day stolen from work with a lie. We went to two bars then to Gino’s for pizza. As I sat at our table rubbing the tarry bow of red wine from my lips with a napkin, I listened for the mumbling of familiar words almost out of earshot: ‘the parents’, ‘I remember’, ‘prison’, ‘she loved him, silly girl’, ‘sorry for her’, ‘I remember’, ‘fourteen’, ‘fifteen’, ‘pervert’, ‘paedo’, ‘sicko’, ‘marry him, she said’, ‘I remember’. I heard nothing and wondered whether people had forgotten or whether Dan had been right and I really had been imagining it during those stilted dinners in the months and the years after. We had given up on eating out eventually and I started cooking elaborate dinners at home instead. Internet shopping saved me from the supermarket, another nest of words and stares. Most of the time, though, even at the weekends now that Freddy had turned eighteen and fled to university, Dan stayed late at work and I ate cheese and biscuits on the sofa.

We were almost drunk when we got home, almost drunk and saturated in each other. We didn’t see the light on the answerphone flashing as we shrugged off our coats and scarves and went up the stairs to bed.



We were woken by the chirping of the phone on Dan’s bedside table. I felt him roll over and scoop it from its cradle. In my dream I had been with Cam again, chasing him through empty hallways and dusty rooms, slowing down every time I got too close. Reluctantly, I opened my eyes and listened.

‘Sarah? Sarah? Shall I get Rosalind? Do you want to talk to her?’ He put his hand over the receiver and spoke to me in a stage whisper: ‘Ros. It’s Sarah. She’s upset. Can you…’ He held the phone out towards me: Take it, please, take it.

I sat on the edge of the bed, facing the wall. Sarah’s voice was damp with tears but hushed, as though she was afraid of being overheard: ‘Oh, Ros. You need to come and get her.’

‘What do you mean? What’s wrong?’

‘She’s not well, Ros.’

‘Does she need a doctor? A hospital? An ambulance?’

‘She needs you. I can’t look after her any more. You need to come. Now, before she starts again. Will you come?’

‘Yes, Sarah. Of course. But before she starts what? What is it? Please tell me.’

‘She’s…she’s drinking. A lot. Maybe other stuff too.’

‘Stuff? You mean drugs?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. She’s a mess. Please just come.’ Her words were swallowed up by the wetness of her sobbing.

‘Sit tight and we’ll be there as soon as we can.’ My voice was calm, but under that voice, in my stomach and my lungs and my veins, something was rising, something old and familiar and frantic. I stood for a moment with the phone in my hands and my back to Dan, pushing the panic – my old companion – back into the past where I thought I had left it.

‘What is it, Ros?’

I spoke to the wall: ‘Sarah says Stephanie is drinking too much, that she’s got herself into a state. She says we need to go and get her. I’m sure she’s exaggerating but we should go anyway. Sarah’s very worried.’

‘Drinking?’

‘Drinking and possibly drugs. Sarah isn’t sure,’ I said, forcing myself to turn and face him. He was half in and half out of bed, one leg on the floor, his knee still resting on the mattress and the edge of the duvet in his hands. Fear or shock had frozen him in place, leaning towards me like a tree in a gale. It was rare to see him so still.

‘Did you know about this, Ros? I thought she was OK now.’

‘Of course I didn’t!’ I snapped. ‘She’s your daughter too. Did you know?’

‘No. Sorry. Of course you didn’t.’ He swayed away from me.

‘Well, we need to get there as soon as we can. Forget showers. Let’s just get in the car and go.’

‘Maybe it would be better if I went.’

‘No. We’ll both go.’ What good would he be to Stephanie? I tried to recall the last time he had spoken to her: probably at the surprise birthday lunch Beatrice had arranged for me back in August. He wouldn’t have seen her since then.

‘I just think it might upset you to see her in a state.’

‘We’ll both go,’ I said again. This was how Tanya had dealt with us both in the days after Stephanie disappeared: instructions given as short statements of fact. We will both go, we will do the television appeal in spite of what your mother might think; later: we will give her space, we will sit on our hands in court.

‘Yes, yes. OK. Yes. Right.’ Then he stood there in his boxer shorts and T-shirt, motionless and frowning.

‘Get dressed, Dan.’

I glimpsed Sarah’s face at the upstairs window as we drew up outside the flat she shared with Stephanie. She launched herself at me as I stepped across the threshold, her bony hands clutched at my coat, pulling me into her and she stooped to press her wet face to my neck. I put my arms around her; she was so easy to love, my daughter’s devoted friend.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said into my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t ring you sooner.’

‘Is she in her room?’ asked Dan. When Sarah nodded he strode across the hallway, surging forwards like an iceberg. But he stopped short outside Stephanie’s door and waited for me.

‘Stephie? Stephanie?’ There was no sound from the room. As soon as I cracked the door open, a smell seeped out: vomit, staleness, something chemical and corrupt. I covered my nose with my hand as I fumbled for the light switch.

At first the form on the bed was just a broken line of hair and skin and clothes, then it was Stephanie. The image of my daughter was juxtaposed with a scene of chaos: an ashtray dribbled butts across the floor and empty wine bottles huddled beside the bed. The rug squelched wet beneath my feet. I closed my fingers around her shoulder and felt the rise and fall of her breaths.

‘She’s been smoking,’ Dan whispered behind me, as if that was the worst thing that had happened. ‘She doesn’t smoke.’

‘Go outside. Go and ask Sarah what’s been going on. I’ll wake her up,’ I said. ‘And close the door behind you.’

He stood for a moment, looking between Stephanie and me. I thought he was about to speak but he said nothing before he tiptoed out of the room. When I turned back to the bed, Stephanie was looking at me. Her eyes were shining pink slivers between swollen lids. I wondered if she had been crying; I wondered if I should cry.

‘Mum,’ she said. She closed her eyes.

‘Darling, we’ve come to look after you. We’re going to take you home for a while.’

‘Is Dad here?’

‘Yes.’

She closed her eyes again, then drew a handful of hair across her face.

‘I can’t come home,’ she said eventually from behind her hair.

‘Yes, you can. You are.’

‘I’m bad. You’ll hate me.’ Her words were slurred, her voice husky.

‘I’ll never hate you, Stephie. Whatever has happened we can fix it together. Your father and I can sort it out, whatever it is. There’s nothing that we can’t work out between us.’

‘That’s exactly what you said to me before. At the police station.’

‘Then you know it’s true, don’t you?’ I crossed to the window and pulled it open, flooding the room with cold November air.

After a long pause she said, ‘OK, Mum. Let’s go.’ It was only later that I wondered at how meekly she agreed to come home with me, how readily she agreed to be my child again.

The two of us shuffled together to the bathroom, her leaning hard on my arm, her bony hip pressing into my flesh. When I let go of her to close the bathroom door, she swayed on her feet as though she was still slightly drunk. I ran her a bath and perched on the loo while she took off her filthy black jeans and the purple top that was ripped and spattered with vomit. I remembered her wearing that top at Easter for a night out in St Albans with Sarah. She had been so beautiful, seemed so untouchable with her pale skin and shining auburn hair; I had been jealous of the youth and possibility in her face.

‘What has happened, sweetheart?’ I asked as I rubbed conditioner into the wet tendrils of her hair, slowly and methodically, spinning out the task. I felt safe in the steamy confines of the bathroom with Stephanie contained in the bathtub. It was like bathing a child before bed, part of a comforting regime that ended with blankets tucked in and tiny eyelids fluttering over tired eyes.

‘Happened?’ she said. ‘Oh, nothing has happened. Well, apart from you turning up.’

‘Is this about Nathan Temperley?’

At the mention of his name she sat up straight in the bath and irritably pushed my hands away from her hair. ‘Oh, please, Mum. That was years ago. Years ago! You can’t blame Nathan Temperley for all the ills of the world. I bet you think he caused the tsunami and the earthquake and the war in Iraq. He’s not omnipotent, you know.’

The sound of his name on her lips brought Tanya’s phone call back to me. How far is that from the prison? Suddenly the bathroom didn’t feel so safe after all. ‘We need to go,’ I said. ‘Get out of the bath, Stephanie.’ As I unfolded the towel Sarah had given me and held it out for her to take, I noticed that my hands were shaking.

Dan and I walked her to the car between us while Sarah watched from the window. I wanted to run back up the stairs and beg her to come with us but it wouldn’t be fair. I slid into the back seat next to Stephanie. As soon as the doors were closed Dan clicked the heating on and turned the radio up so the car became too hot and too loud. I was grateful for that, for the fact that we could drive home in our individual bubbles of warmth and noise. Stephanie leant her head against the window, her eyes on the road as it slipped by. When we left the motorway and crossed the border into Hertfordshire, she sat up and pressed her open palm against the window. I reached across and held her other hand, the one that lay in her lap. It was freezing cold and each finger ended in a black crescent as though she had been digging in the garden without tools. I unbuckled my seat belt and shifted across the space between us to wrap myself around her. I thought she would pull away from me right until the moment she relaxed into my arms.

‘Bloody hell, that hatchet-faced fantasist is the last thing we need right now,’ said Dan as we approached the house, breaking the silence that had lasted the length of the journey. Pete from number four was standing at the bottom of our drive, sunlight flashing from his glasses. He must have seen us setting off and caught the whiff of something unusual.

‘Hello!’ he said as soon as we got out of the car. ‘I saw you two haring off this morning and now here you are with the lovely Steph.’

‘She’s got the flu,’ Dan said, stepping in front of us, shielding us. ‘A nasty case. We’ve brought her home for some TLC.’

‘Oh, the poor thing, she does look ill. It’s that time of year, I suppose,’ he said. ‘You get better, love. And—’

‘Let’s get you inside,’ Dan said to Stephanie, putting his arm around her and propelling her gently forwards. ‘Bye, Pete.’

Pete backed out of the drive, probably formulating news angles, headlines, sound bites as he went. Speculative stories about Stephanie failing exams, having a breakdown or being dumped would soon be criss-crossing the street. When he stumbled on the kerb, part of me willed him to fall and bash his head on the concrete.

As I walked up the stairs with Stephanie shuffling in front of me I had already started to think in terms of This time and Last time. This was the second time my daughter had arrived home thin, blurred and packed tight with secrets.

* * *

When Stephanie and Nathan Temperley were discovered, they were both taken into custody – Stephanie’s custody protective and his the normal type, whatever that meant: Pentonville, a cell, a bucket, bars, men with smudged tattoos on their hands. Stephanie had refused to come home to us at first.

‘I can’t go with them,’ she said when Dan and I went to collect her from the police station, turning her whole body away from me and speaking only to Tanya. I had already hugged her. I had already cried into her hair – the strange hair, dyed from its natural red to an unconvincing platinum blonde since I had last seen her – as she stood there with her arms around me in a limp echo of my embrace.

‘What do you mean, darling?’ I said. ‘Of course you can come home with us. We meant what we said on telly, you’re not in any trouble. We aren’t cross with you. You’re not going to be punished. There’s nothing that we can’t work out between us.’ I had rehearsed those words for days, knowing that they would be needed but not knowing when.

‘I can’t just go back there and pretend it never happened,’ she said, turning towards us. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want me to forget Nate even exists, to pretend it was all a big mistake. Tell me, Mum, Dad, is it just a phase I’m going through?’ Her voice was a savage whisper, almost a snarl. Had this anger always been inside her? Had I lived alongside it unknowingly for fifteen years? Or was it something he had given her?

‘We just want you safe at home with us, Stephie. We want to look after you. We love you,’ I said. Dan nodded but said nothing. He was looking at me, at Tanya, anywhere except at Stephanie.

‘And I love him,’ she said. ‘And when they let him out we will be together. Will you still love me then? Will you accept us? They will let him out so it’s no good pretending that it isn’t going to happen.’

‘Of course we’ll still love you. Nothing can change that.’ I reached out and took her right hand in mine. After a second, she snatched it back.

‘That’s not what I asked you.’ She looked me straight in the eye for the first time, her pale irises flashing in the strip-light’s glare. ‘Will you accept him? Us?’

‘We can talk about that at home, Stephie,’ Dan said. ‘We’ve been so worried; it’s been very difficult—’

She cut him off. ‘Your answer is no. You won’t. So I’m not coming home. You don’t get me without him so it’s us or nothing. Your choice.’ She walked away from us and stood by the door, her hand already resting on the handle as she looked to Tanya for permission to pass through it. I felt a bitter burst of resentment. I thought Tanya was my ally, I thought she was on my side.

‘Back in a moment,’ Tanya mouthed to me over her shoulder as she left the room with Stephanie.

For the next three days we didn’t know exactly where Stephanie was – just that she was safe. We didn’t leave the house in that time; Dan, Freddy and I huddled behind closed curtains. We sat under blankets watching daytime television and eating tinned soup and toast from our laps as though we were all off work with colds.

I still don’t know – even now that I know so much – what made her decide to come home. Did she miss us? Did she not like wherever it was she was staying? Had she started to forget him now that he was locked away? Or did she think things would go better for him if she could get her family on side and show the court that there had been no lasting damage? Tanya brought her home to us on a Saturday morning and left her with Dan and me in the hallway. There was a collection of long seconds when the three of us eyed each other, waiting for someone to speak. Then Freddy barrelled through the door from the sitting room and put his arms around her. She cried against his shoulder, and said, ‘I’m sorry, Freddy. I’m sorry.’

In the hours that followed, I tore myself between never wanting to take my eyes off her again, not even when I knew she was safely in her bedroom, and Tanya’s insistence that she needed space to grieve for her relationship with Temperley. I followed her to her bedroom door but went no further. I tried to work out what she was thinking and waited for her to talk to me.

* * *

This time I followed Stephanie into her old bedroom. I had a feeling that the bedding hadn’t been changed since Beatrice had stayed a couple of weekends earlier. Stephanie returned to her old room so seldom that Beatrice had taken to using it when she came to stay. Bea said it was quieter up here in the attic but we both knew it was really so she could smoke cigarettes out of the bedroom window without Dan catching a whiff of menthol smoke.

‘You should get some sleep, sweetheart,’ I said, pulling back the duvet cover and scanning the sheet beneath for telltale hairs, patches of evidence.

I gave her one of Dan’s T-shirts and put a glass of water on the bedside table. I drew the curtains but daylight seeped through them and the darkn. . .