The Night Visitor

by Lucy Atkins, Lucy Atkins

Genres: Suspense; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Professor Olivia Sweetman has worked hard to achieve the life she loves. But as she stands before a crowd at the launch of her new bestseller she can barely pretend to smile. Only one person knows what Olivia has done and if the truth comes out, she will lose everything. Vivian Tester, Olivia's unofficial research assistant, has secrets of her own. As the relationship between these two women grows more entangled and complex, a bizarre act of violence changes everything…

Release date: May 4, 2017

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 544

Sample

The Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons, London

Olivia huddled behind Arteries, Heart and Veins. Through the gaps between the tall specimen jars in the cabinet she could see the faces on the ground floor, looking up at Joy on the balcony. It was such a long way down.

The room was packed: all two hundred guests must have come. She couldn’t see their faces properly because the jars of hardened arteries and diseased heart tissue were acting as a screen and she didn’t want to look as if she was peering through them. She watched Joy’s animated profile instead. Joy was saying very kind things. Olivia felt sick.

‘Straight in at number two! That’s what we consider a triumph!’ Joy’s scarlet and gold earrings caught the light as she raised her champagne flute and cried, ‘A bestseller in its very first week. So, how about it? Shall we take it to number one?’

A cheer rang out through the museum; raucous voices lifted, echoed off the high ceilings and shivered through the glass display cabinets and medical oddities – faces torn by bullets and bombs, dissected limbs, diseased and malformed organs suspended in cloudy fluid. Bones, so gigantic that they must surely be from whales or mammoths, were displayed between the ground floor and this, the mezzanine. Under the clever, bleached lights they looked so curved and smooth-lined that they seemed more like sculptures than fragments of anatomy.

‘In case you missed it, there’s a table by the entrance where you can get the book for Olivia to sign,’ Joy said. ‘But that’s enough of a sales pitch from me. Let me hand you over to the woman of the hour, Britain’s favourite history professor, Olivia Sweetman!’

There was nowhere to put her glass so she held on to it as she stepped forwards. Joy squeezed her arm and moved out of the way. Olivia walked up to the Perspex-covered railings and looked down.

It really was too high – ridiculously so. What were the publicists thinking, putting her all the way up here for the speech? She would have been better off standing on the stairs or even on the ground floor with the guests gathered round her. But it was too late, all their faces were turned up, flushed with champagne and the energy of the night and this spectacle – her – standing alone in a yellow dress, glowing and supposedly triumphant. They were all waiting for her to speak.

She took a deep breath. She longed to unfurl wings and soar off this edge, over their heads and away to somewhere remote and hidden where none of them would ever find her, but she forced herself to speak. ‘Thank you so much, Joy, what a kind introduction. And thank you, all of you, for coming tonight to celebrate the launch of my book.’ Her voice came out clear and calm even though the glass in her hand was trembling. She rested that on the barrier too. She was used to public speaking, to facing a crowd and being listened to, but it was different to be looking down at friends, family, colleagues, journalists, TV people, bloggers and critics with this awful, sickening secret pressing in her gut like a tumour.

‘I hope you can all hear me? It’s an awfully long way down and as some of you will know I’m not that good with heights.’

There was a ripple of laughter, voices called up in encouragement. ‘We’ll catch you!’ someone – a man – yelled from the back. She wondered if the people directly below her could see up her full-skirted dress. She crossed her legs.

‘OK! Well, it’s amazing to be here with you tonight in this wonderful Hunterian Museum to celebrate the launch of Annabel.’ She noticed David standing at the front. His face was a mask of neutrality. Jess was at his side, her bobbed hair held back by a hairband. She was holding his hand. There was no sign of the boys. Olivia smiled directly down at her daughter but Jess didn’t react; perhaps she was more interested in the grisly objects in the cabinets that framed the balcony.

‘It seemed fitting to have the launch at the Royal College of Surgeons.’ She gestured at the cabinets. ‘Isn’t this an extraordinary museum?’ She knew she was stalling, unable to bring herself to talk about the book. She scanned the crowd for Dom and Paul but she couldn’t see either of them. She had to control this sick panic inside her – she had to sound relaxed. She’d prepared the speech about Annabel and they were all expecting it. She could, she would, deliver it.

‘I didn’t just choose to write about Annabel because of her diary, though her personal story is certainly sensational . . .’ She heard her voice waver and took another deep breath, forcing herself to continue. ‘I wanted to do something bigger. I wanted to acknowledge the debt that we owe Annabel Burley and all her brave Victorian contemporaries at the London School of Medicine for Women. These women had to fight for their calling in a way that few of us today can possibly comprehend . . .’

When she came to the end of her speech, there was enthusiastic applause, whoops, cheers. ‘I have so many people to thank,’ she said. ‘I honestly don’t know where to start. Annabel’s a collaboration, really.’

She noticed The Sunday Times’ literary editor standing directly below her. Their eyes met and she saw something – a glint, perhaps, a certain chill – that made her wonder whether he could possibly have discovered, or somehow intuited, the truth about what she had done.

She felt cold, suddenly, as if someone had cracked a hole in the ceiling to let the October night in. She forced herself to smile. ‘So – thank yous! Right. I hope I don’t forget anyone . . . First of all, I’m so grateful to my editor, Joy, who has given me unstinting support and direction. And my agent, Carol, I don’t know where I’d be . . .’ She ran through the list she had prepared, thanking people one by one.

‘I also need to acknowledge that without the meticulous and detailed research help I got, Annabel would have taken years to write and would have been a far worse biography. I’m truly grateful for all the help I had putting this together.’ She knew that it was bizarre not to mention Vivian by name. She hoped nobody would notice this omission. She was banking on the fact that, for most of the people in the room, research was a process, not a person. If they thought about it at all, they would envisage postgrads in public record offices – not a dogged and blank-faced sixty-year-old housekeeper.

But she must not think about Vivian. Not here, not tonight, not now. She tightened her grip on the balcony. If she was going to get through this she had to erase Vivian from her mind completely.

‘Finally – and I’m going to try really hard not to get too emotional – I want to thank my beautiful children, Jess, Paul and Dom. They’re all here somewhere. Thank you for putting up with all my distractions, absences and grumpiness.’ Jess was beaming, but she still couldn’t see her boys. Dom was probably smoking on a bench out in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the last time she saw Paul he had been Snapchatting a necrotic skull. ‘You’re so patient and remarkable. I love you three so much.’ She felt her voice break. ‘You’re . . . my whole world.’ She cleared her throat and straightened her shoulders. She couldn’t let herself disintegrate. The attention in the room had tightened; everyone was suddenly too still, too quiet, the pack sensing weakness.

She hardened herself. She had rehearsed this final part while standing in the toilet cubicle an hour before. ‘So, last of all, my husband, David Linder.’ She leaned over a little and lowered her glass in his direction. Their eyes met; she didn’t blink or look away, she kept her voice low, steady and powerful. ‘What can I say? A brilliant writer – no stranger to the bestseller list himself – popular psychologist, columnist and devoted father. How can I possibly quantify what you’ve done for me, for this book and for us, as a family? You are . . . well, quite simply, you’re extraordinary.’

David’s face flushed deeply. His body remained motionless but he forced his mouth into a twisted smile while everyone around him cheered and lifted their glasses in his direction. Jess was looking up at her dad, perhaps perturbed by his stillness. She noticed Emma standing behind them, in a pallid shift dress, and Khalil was there, too, next to Emma. Neither friend was smiling. So they must know, Chloe must have told them. She scanned the room, but she couldn’t see Chloe any more. Perhaps it had been too much for her and she’d slipped away.

‘OK!’ she said. ‘I’m going to have to stop before I embarrass myself. There are some gruesome medical-themed canapés floating around – has anyone dared to try a quail’s egg eyeball? Please help yourself to those and please drink lots of the fizz! Thank you, again, for your extraordinary love and support. I’m just so grateful to you all for coming. I feel really lucky to have you. Thank you!’ She raised her own glass and took a swig.

The museum erupted into enthusiastic applause, cheers, more whoops, even a piercing whistle, which she felt sure was Dom, somewhere at the very back.

As she was scanning the edge of the room for her eldest son she glimpsed a figure disappearing through Curiosities – not Dom – a bulky shape, face obscured, wearing a long dark overcoat, and she felt the guests, in their glittering clothes, all their noise and body heat, pause and recede. She narrowed her eyes and strained to see but the figure had vanished into the gloom. It couldn’t be. She was imagining it again. The party was invite only. A stranger would never have been let in.

And then Joy’s arms were around her and she smelled her familiar musky perfume. ‘Well done!’ Joy said. ‘That was perfect!’

She hugged Joy back, then clung to her and for a moment she felt as if Joy was holding her up, and were the other woman to step back and release her, she would fall to the floor.

‘Are you OK?’ Joy hissed in her ear. Then Carol was there, squeezing her shoulder – ‘Well done!’ – and both agent and editor were steering her away from the balcony towards the broad curve of the stairs.

‘You were just great!’ Carol said.

‘And now there are books to be signed.’ Joy guided her to the top step. ‘Two hundred of them.’

She felt her ankle weaken and flip on the too-high heel; her knee buckled and she lurched forwards, but Joy grabbed her arm just in time, yanking her back before she could plummet headlong down the staircase. ‘Whoopsie! Don’t fall – we need you in one piece.’

But Olivia didn’t reply because, as they rounded the corner on the stairwell, she was already scanning the shadowy margins of the room, searching not for the figure in the overcoat, but for the one person she dreaded seeing even more than him, the one person who knew the truth and might tell it. Vivian.

Ileford Manor, East Sussex, two months previously

Summer has not come to Sussex this year. It has rained incessantly since early July and now in mid-August it shows no sign of abating. Sometimes fat balls roll from the clouds and bounce off the well cover and courtyard, filling all the dips and runnels, but mostly it is just a mindless grey drizzle that scribbles everything out.

I have taken to writing things down while I have my elevenses in the library every morning. I have bought a special notebook and I do it most days now. I need to make sense of how I come to be in this uncertain position. Writing things down seems to ease the chaos in my mind a little and, of course, it occupies my brain. After all, I cannot just sit here and wait for her. Not again.

My thoughts are as hectic as ants disturbed from a nest, they cannot be corralled. This is partly a result of sleep deprivation. Sleep has been problematic since I lost Bertie, but since Annabel came to an end the problem has worsened considerably. Last night I didn’t drop off until very late. I slept fitfully for an hour or so but then, as I knew she would, my visitor woke me, just before dawn.

When Bertie was with me she almost never came. He protected me from her as he did from so many of life’s painful troubles. He was also a great comfort on the rare occasions that she did come. He would calm and reassure me; we would go and sit together in the kitchen, wrapped in a blanket, until my breathing and heart rate were steady. But now that Bertie is no longer with me, now that I’m alone again, she is back and it is as bad now as it was when I was an adolescent – perhaps even worse. For the past nine days she has appeared in my room nightly.

Perhaps the tension of waiting for Olivia has something to do with this. My mind has certainly become overactive. While there is always the cleaning and upkeep of the house – leaks to fix, dampness to treat, roof tiles to pin – these tasks do not occupy my brain. I did not realize how dependent I had become on working with Olivia, what purpose it gave me, until it was over. For eighteen months my mind has been engaged. I had almost forgotten what it felt like to be stimulated by work. I was interested again, I was developing new skills and learning about the past.

I also, and perhaps this is the greatest surprise of all, miss the contact I had with Olivia. I have developed a great fondness – yes, even admiration – for Olivia, and I never for a moment believed that would be possible.

My email inbox is eerily silent now. The manuscript has been edited, though I have not seen the finished product. It is two months until publication and my services, it seems, are no longer required. It is hard to adjust to this. I have become accustomed to opening my computer every morning after breakfast to find my inbox full of Olivia’s messages: responses to my queries, instructions on a new line of enquiry, discussion about how to approach a particular issue or section. Now all this is over, my inbox is a wasteland. This morning I had four emails: one from a company offering knockdown deals on remedies for malaise or pitfall traps, another selling beating trays, a third, walking boots and a fourth announcing the Marks & Spencer summer sale. I long for the words ‘Dear Vivian’ . . .

My coffee is getting cold though I seem to have eaten my two biscuits without realizing it. I know I should not have the digestives every morning but this has been my habit for decades now and habits are very hard to change. The mere sight of the oriental ladies on the biscuit tin seems to calm and reassure me. They are almost the only thing, now, that connect me to my old life and routines. I have always found it hard to let routines go, even when they no longer serve me well.

The library door is open and the faint sound of the leak in the gunroom ceiling echoes across the great hall. Drops of rain burrow through the plaster, pause, then clang into the bucket. Ileford is in a permanent state of disintegration, it spits water from every joint, swells and groans and leaks around me. I seem to be constantly calling out roofers and plumbers and damp specialists. Increasingly I feel as if my body is mimicking the house. The joints of my fingers are swampy and tender, my ankles are swollen and pockets of gas explode between my vertebrae when I twist or turn. My left knee is particularly troublesome. Sometimes it is reluctant to bend at all.

I have to get away from this place. I am impatient to get started on the new book. For the first time since my retirement I can see a future for myself, but Olivia has gone silent. She has not even responded properly to my last email. I fleshed out the Chocolate Cream Poisoner idea for her in the hope of a more specific response or even instructions to start on the background work (which, of course, I already have). I sent it to her exactly nine days ago now, six full days before her departure, so she has had plenty of time to think about it.

Of course, I know that Olivia’s life is very different to mine. She is terribly busy, there are a great many demands on her time. But she could, at least, have given me an indication of her intentions. Instead, all I got was, ‘Thank you for this, I’ll certainly take a look when I get back from my holiday.’

It never occurred to me, when I began this, that I might end up working with Olivia, or even that there would be a book. My plan was simply to allow her to write an academic paper on the diary.

I had a strategy worked out for piquing her interest. I knew she was likely to come to the Farmhouse at half-term, so I managed to persuade Maureen to visit her sister in Jersey while I filled in for her at the museum. I knew it would be better if Olivia came to me rather than the other way around.

If that hadn’t worked – if she hadn’t responded to the flyer – then the next step would have been to write to her explaining that I had a sensational and unseen Victorian source, and offering to bring it to her Bloomsbury office. I would have said I had seen her BBC documentary about insane Victorian women and felt sure that Annabel’s diary would be of interest to her. She would not have been able to resist a document that Annabel called ‘my sole confidant’ and which contained a startling confession – what historian would? Fortunately, I did not have to go to her because the flyer brought her to me. I don’t think I really believed it would until she burst through the museum door with her wet child that February day. I was very shocked. I froze behind the desk, unable to look at her, braced, as if for a blow. For a few moments I could not even speak.

And now here I am eighteen months later waiting for Olivia again, albeit in a very different frame of mind this time. This time I am full of such hope, impatience and agitation that I almost cannot bear it.

That’s why, late last night, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I decided to take a holiday. To the south of France.

I leave the day after tomorrow, which will give me time to clean and shut up the house. I have booked the ferry and a modest bed & breakfast – they call it a chambres d’hôte – and I plan to spend a week walking in the low altitude Provençal hills looking for harlequin ladybirds. The harlequin is a worrying, devious, mimicking species, a most destructive invader and so charismatic. I have always had a soft spot for ladybirds.

The library shutters are open today but layers of rain blot out the view and I can barely see as far as the wych elms at the edge of the lawn. Rain is a brutal jailer, it cuts one off from the world, seals all the edges. It is probably not healthy to be alone so much, even if you are by nature a solitary person, as I am. When Lady Burley and Bertie were here the rain did not bother me at all. Bertie and I would bring the coffee and biscuits into the library on a tray every morning and the three of us would sit together and discuss whatever needed to be done that day. It felt reassuring and calming to hear rain lashing at the windows. When Lady Burley went to the care home it was just Bertie and me, but we did not lose the elevenses habit. Rain rarely troubled us. I would just put on my Barbour and get on with it. Now it is only me, though, I find myself preoccupied by weather. There is no cosiness any more, just the aching damp and the leaks.

I still miss Bertie, intensely, daily. Every day as I pass beneath the minstrel’s gallery with my tray I feel as if he is by my side. It can be a jolt to settle into the wing-backed chair, reach for my coffee and find that I’m alone. Perhaps writing things down is also a form of companionship. If so, it is a poor one, because when I lay down my pen I often feel more alone than ever.

The problem, of course, is that I have allowed myself to become tied up in another person’s life. Other people are messy; they have a tendency to let you down. It is my great hope that Olivia will turn out to be different. We share a passion, after all, and we are a team now – she said it herself – so she surely will not disappoint me.

But as I put away my notebook each day, I ask myself the same question: What on earth will I do if she does?

South of France, Day One

The front doorstep of Mas Saint Pierre was an actual tombstone. Olivia dropped her bags and crouched to look at the faded lettering. The word ‘sacré’ was etched into the stone beneath her plimsolls but the rest of the inscription – a life packaged between two dates – had been erased by generations of feet crossing the threshold. The pocked stone made her think how insignificant it all was, really, their stresses and worries, hopes and fears, how quickly erased and forgotten all this would be. She must keep things in perspective. She could fix this. She had to. Nobody had died.

She heard David stomping across the gravel courtyard below and she straightened, sucking in the hot, herb-scented air.

It had been an interminable drive down through France, but of course the ferry was cheaper than five of them flying. They were three hours later than planned. There was no sign of the others so they were probably lost too. The sat nav didn’t work and the sign at the property gate was so decrepit, so snugly cradled in rock, that they’d had to circle back several times before they spotted it. By then Paul and Jess had been fighting, savagely, over a packet of dry French biscuits that neither of them liked while Dominic, plugged into headphones, had let out intermittent snarls and thrown an occasional slap.

When she’d eventually noticed the sign, Olivia had wrenched the steering wheel so hard that they’d almost slammed into the rock face. The children yelled, the car bumped up onto the roadside, wheels hurling up gravel and dust. ‘Jesus Christ!’ David had clutched at the dashboard, theatrically. She’d said nothing, but when he’d got out to open the tall iron gates she’d put her foot down and driven up and around the corner, leaving him to follow on foot.

She’d pulled up in the shady courtyard beneath the house and next to a crumbling limestone tower. The tower was just a couple of storeys tall with a single slit window. It was in the shade of the hillside, surrounded by silvery olive trees. She had a feeling the owners had mentioned it – a connection to a priest, perhaps – or maybe the ecclesiastical house name had implanted this idea in her mind. She wasn’t sure. She had, in fact, only a very hazy memory of booking the place back in January. Work had been so intense at the time.

The house was up some stairs. It was pale, low and wreathed in vines, with lavender bushes lined up along the front like patient purple hedgehogs. It looked beautiful, and expensive. She’d never have booked it if she’d known then what she knew now but she had to put that out of her head – they were here, it had all been paid for months ago. She had to try to push everything aside and enjoy what she could of this holiday.

The August heat was intense even this late in the day, the heavy air busy with the high, tinnitus whirr of cicadas. She knew that she should go back down and help David to bring up the remaining bags, but she didn’t want to help him. Jess and Paul were out of the car and over by the tower now, shoving at its peeling front door. Dom was still in the back seat, as if the long drive had softened his fifteen-year-old bones. If they brought him regular food and water he’d probably choose to spend the entire fortnight right there.

David had the boot open and she watched him lift out the bags. His shoulders were solid from his daily swims, his linen shirt crumpled, hair dishevelled, his jaw shadowed by stubble and his skin, always olive-hued, now lightly tanned from a recent week in the States. He looked a little tired, admittedly, but also robust, as if he was stubbornly oblivious to the chaos he’d created. It was unreasonable to resent him for his good health and his optimistic, handsome face, but at that moment she just couldn’t help herself.

The tower behind him seemed to tilt slightly, as if wearied by all the comings and goings, all the petty family dramas it had seen. She remembered then that the owners had called it a ‘cabanon’. They’d said something about an unsafe upper floor.

‘The tower’s locked,’ Jess yelled over the courtyard. Paul had flopped onto its front step, his pale and gangly legs spread out. The poor boy looked so limp and dejected, like an unwatered plant. He needed feeding. He always needed feeding. At thirteen, he was growing about an inch a day.

‘Come on,’ she called down. ‘Help Dad with the bags. And tell your brother to get out of the car!’

The Parisian owners had extended the place but it didn’t look as if it could accommodate three couples and six children. She must have checked this at some point, but she’d been so stressed when she was booking that she couldn’t remember the details. She’d just transferred the vast sum of euros and forgotten about it. David was coming up the stairs now but Jess and Paul had vanished behind the tower. She heard Jess scream, ‘Lizard!’

‘Christ,’ David dropped the bags and pointed at the doorstep. ‘Is that a gravestone?’

She shrugged and tucked her hair behind her ears. ‘The door’s locked.’

He held up an old-fashioned key with an ornate handle. ‘It was in an open box at the gate,’ he said. ‘I assume it’s for the front door.’

She took it from him.

‘Didn’t they leave you any instructions?’ he said, as if it was all her responsibility.

She looked back at him, blinked, and then she replied, quite slowly, ‘They said they’d leave the key in the box.’

The entrance hall was dim and cool. They dumped the bags by an armoire that smelled of beeswax. Jess shot past them. Her long golden hair undulated and her new sandals slapped on the flagstones as she vanished down the hall and through a doorway.

They followed her into a cool living room. Olivia felt a wash of relief as she took in the open-plan kitchen, a pale-hued living area and a wall of French windows through which she could make out a vine-shaded terrace, wooden sun loungers, a long trestle table, a generous swimming pool and a view of dusky hills. Jess started wrestling with the locks.

‘Well, not bad.’ David went into the kitchen. ‘Not bad at all.’ If he felt that they shouldn’t be here then he wasn’t going to let it show.

He was obviously planning to behave as if nothing had changed. Perhaps he was right to take this approach. Nothing would be gained by ruining the next two weeks with recriminations, guilt and apologies. And yet the effort of maintaining this pretence already felt immense to Olivia. She felt as if they were balancing an unexploded bomb between them and if one of them dropped their end it would detonate, taking out the whole family.

Dom slouched past her into the kitchen and straight to the fridge. ‘The doorstep to this house is a gravestone,’ he growled as he passed her. ‘Is it just me, or is that fucking creepy?’

Paul opened the French windows and he and Jess burst onto the terrace. Behind her, she heard David say to Dominic, ‘There’s nothing in the fridge, buddy, we need to unpack the food first.’ Dom did not reply. He walked past his father without looking at him, onto the terrace. How much, she wondered, did Dom know about his father’s recent actions? Was that what this was about?

But Dom’s refusal to speak to David predated all this. She’d read about the teenage boy’s need to separate from his father in order to define his own personality, but Dom seemed particularly vehement about this, particularly incensed, as if David had committed a heinous and unforgivable crime.

He was standing, feet apart, looking at the view. He was almost as tall as David and good-looking, like him – even-featured with intense dark eyes and a dimple on his square chin. His shoulders were broad, too. From behind he looked more like a man than a boy, a stranger discovered on this foreign terrace. . . .