The Skeleton Key

by Erin Kelly

Genres: Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

THIS REUNION WILL TEAR A FAMILY APART ...

Summer, 2021. Nell has come home at her family's insistence to celebrate an anniversary. Fifty years ago, her father wrote The Golden Bones. Part picture book, part treasure hunt, Sir Frank Churcher created a fairy story about Elinore, a murdered woman whose skeleton was scattered all over England. Clues and puzzles in the pages of The Golden Bones led readers to seven sites where jewels were buried - gold and precious stones, each a different part of a skeleton. One by one, the tiny golden bones were dug up until only Elinore's pelvis remained hidden.

The book was a sensation. A community of treasure hunters called the Bonehunters formed, in frenzied competition, obsessed to a dangerous degree. People sold their homes to travel to England and search for Elinore. Marriages broke down as the quest consumed people. A man died. The book made Frank a rich man. His daughter, Nell, became a recluse.

But now the Churchers must be reunited. The book is being reissued along with a new treasure hunt and a documentary crew are charting everything that follows. Nell is appalled, and terrified. During the filming, Frank finally reveals the whereabouts of the missing golden bone. And then all hell breaks loose.

From the bestselling author of He Said/She Said and Watch Her Fall, this is a taut, mesmerising novel about a daughter haunted by her father's legacy . . .

'An intricately plotted thriller, full of detail and invention, with impeccably realised settings and characters as monstrous as they are believable. Above all it is a completely addictive story of two families destroyed by success. Erin Kelly is a genius' JANE CASEY

'Moody, propulsive, and one of the most intriguing set ups I've read in years. Erin Kelly doesn't put a foot wrong in this atmospheric, original thriller' GILLIAN McALLISTER

'A feat of real ambition and imagination - original, suspenseful, and with complex characters that spring irresistibly to life on the page, this is Erin Kelly at her finest' LOUISE CANDLISH

(P) 2022 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Release date: September 1, 2022

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 512

Sample

Author’s Note

When I was a child my favourite picture book was the 1979 treasure hunt phenomenon Masquerade, by artist Kit Williams. On every page, riddles were posed, and intricate, dreamlike paintings depicted Jack Hare in his quest to deliver a jewel from the moon to the sun. Each picture was bordered by letters that held a clue to the location of a tiny hare, wrought in gold, studded with precious stones, and buried somewhere in England.

By the time I was old enough to read Masquerade the prize had been claimed, but that didn’t stop me loving the book. The paintings seemed to offer up some new detail every time I looked at them. The page I loved best was a double-page spread of a little girl sitting in a field of dog roses while Jack Hare galloped past. I envied her so much: she was in the story, as I longed to be. I thought that if I looked at the picture for long enough I might fall into it, and, in a way, I did. The book became part of me, as only the stories we read in childhood can.

Masquerade spawned many imitations but nothing caught the public imagination in quite the same way. As I grew up, I wondered how the book would have been received today, when code and algorithm and GPS coexist with ink and paper and boots on the ground.

In 2010 I got my answer. Forrest Fenn was an American antique dealer whose memoir The Thrill of the Chase contained nine clues to the whereabouts of a million-dollar treasure chest. It was another study in the human impulse to uncover secrets. The internet meant that hunters could trade theories in real time. They also laid false trails, for just as strong as the need to lay secrets bare is the compulsion to keep them. ‘Forrest fever’ gripped America. Fenn was mobbed at conventions and his home became a fortress as hunters tried to scale the walls. By the time the haul was found, in rural Montana, five hunters had died in their quest; the ‘lucky’ winner was subject to death threats and forced into hiding.

Kit Williams’s paintings are still a source of wonder and fascination to me. I want to stress that it is his work that inspired me, and that all of the characters in this novel, and their deeds, are purely of my imagining, as are the ‘Bonehunters’ you will meet in these pages.

Chapter 1

Kilburn, London NW6
December 1969

It ends in blood and shattered bone but it does not start that way. It starts with ice and fire.

December is biting hard but the pubs are warm and Guinness thaws the veins. It is the shortest day of the year, the sun set at half past three, and Frank and Lal, and Lal’s girlfriend Marcelle, have been drinking in Mulligan’s since before it got dark. The guys are six months out of art school and supplementing their dole money by recreating Old Masters in chalk for tourists. They did eight hours today, knees throbbing after all that time on the cold cobbles of Covent Garden. Mona Lisa, crowd-pleaser. They’re a good team, so well-matched in talent that even they can never tell who drew what.

Frank is waiting for the idea that will launch him on the art world. His father, the Admiral, says it’s not too late for Frank to go back to his engineering degree and follow him into the Navy, but he’ll have to find him first.

Frank turns out his trouser pockets. ‘Ten bob left,’ he says.

‘Will we get a carry-out?’ asks Lal.

A minute later, bottles clink in Marcelle’s string bag. Outside, the dustbins lining the road sparkle with frost. Lal and Marcelle walk ahead. She’s a bit scrawny for Frank’s liking. Give him a dolly bird, dimples and curves, any day of the week. It’s no bad thing they have different taste in girls. A friendship like the one he shares with Lal is too rare to risk for a woman. They were both running away from their own institutions – a career in the Navy for Frank, the priesthood for Lal – and, when they collided, recognition was instant. They both understood what it took to leave, and also that you never quite could.

‘Would you look here,’ says Lal, coming to a stop. ‘Firewood.’

Someone has thrown out a set of four dining chairs, stuffing spilling from cracked leather. Frank and Lal take two each. The front door opens to reveal Cora, the artist who lives on the top floor, and whose curves and dimples Frank has been admiring for months.

‘Hey, man. I was just about to claim them for myself.’ Cora smiles. There’s a gap between her two front teeth and she’s had it filled with gold. Like most girls, Cora addresses Lal as though Frank’s not even there. Lal’s all lean muscle and dark curls, and women can’t get enough of it. For the most part, female attention goes over Lal’s head. He’s winning a game he’s not even playing.

Frank sees an opportunity. ‘Shame to light two fires when we could all sit around one,’ he says. ‘We’ve got drink,’ he adds when Cora hesitates.

‘Cool,’ she replies.

There’s no door to Cora’s rooms, just a beaded curtain made of beer can ring-pulls that tinkles as they part it and step into a different world. They pass Cora’s bedroom, directly above Frank’s. Moonlight slants across the brass bed whose springs and headboard creak and bang in the night, suggesting that, unlike most girls, Cora practises free love as well as preaches it. In her sitting room, the fire in the grate is almost out. An old bottle serves as a candlestick for a flickering taper. A record, something folky and plaintive, is playing on an unseen turntable. Her stuff is a mess of contradictions: she has the I Ching, half a dozen astrology textbooks, the Bible and the Qur’an on her shelves and a deck of tarot cards is laid on a silk scarf as though a reading has just been interrupted. It should be chaos but it hangs together beautifully; this place is more museum or curiosity shop than bedsit. Cora calls herself an artist but to Frank’s mind she is more of a maker. She sews, she is a potter, she paints. She flits. She’s older than them – late twenties, at a guess – and she’s still living hand-to-mouth. Lal’s got the same feckless streak, only in his case it’s the drink that will be his undoing. Since leaving art college Frank has been gripped by a panic that his talent stops at the wrist. When his idea finally comes to him, he’ll apply himself with a discipline that would make a naval officer look like idle.

Frank has rigged all the electricity meters, but when he flips the light switch, nothing happens.

‘I’m out of bulbs.’ Cora lights more candles, one from the other. Frank rescues a loose lock of her hair from a flame. It’s so soft, it feels as if it might turn to mist in his hands. He holds it for a second longer than he needs to and when Cora turns her eighteen-carat smile on him he thinks, maybe.

Lal throws a seat cushion on to the grate and the fire throws back a cloud of soot.

The record Cora’s playing suits an open fire. The instruments are acoustic, traditional: guitars, Irish-sounding drums, twisted tales about murdered virgins, haunted castles, talking ravens and vengeful knights. Lal up-ends the half-bottle of Tullamore Dew that was full just a few minutes ago.

‘Who writes this hey-nonny-no crap?’ asks Marcelle.

‘Like, they’re folk songs,’ says Cora, not taking offence. ‘The whole point is that no one knows who wrote them. It’s history, it’s in our blood. These songs, they were captured just before they died, like . . . like – butterflies caught in a net and pinned.’

Marcelle takes Cora’s enthusiasm and returns it with a slow blink.

‘It was a whole scene,’ says Cora. ‘Edwardian scholars went to the countryside and got the workers to sing all the old songs from the fields, just before the industrial revolution ended the old ways.’

‘Ah, the good old days of rickets and child mortality,’ says Marcelle. Frank tries to catch her eye. Any more piss-taking and Cora might throw them all out.

‘Well, anyway,’ says Cora. ‘Loads of cool musicians are rediscovering them. It’s all part of a movement, going back to a time when things were more real.’ She gestures to a mural she’s painted on the far wall. ‘I’m making a map of English folklore. You’ve got the Pendle witches and vampires up north, King Arthur down south . . .’

Witches and vampires don’t sound particularly real to Frank but he’d happily declare a belief in pixies and elves if it got Cora into bed. There’s a blank pad beside his armchair. He takes a stick of charcoal from his pocket and begins to sketch her. He starts with the perfect hood of her eyelid. Her hair flows from his hand like water.

On the beanbag, Lal loses his battle with his eyelids.

‘I’m off,’ says Marcelle. ‘Big meeting in the morning.’

‘Anything exciting?’ asks Cora.

Frank shades the swell of her lower lip then smudges the charcoal.

‘I’ve got to find the new Alice in Wonderland, so if you’ve got an ingenious idea for a ground-breaking children’s book you could have on my desk by ten o’clock tomorrow morning, that’d be great.’

Behind the door to Cora’s rooms hangs a beaded curtain made of beer can ring-pulls. It tinkles as they part it and step into a different world.

Cora gets up to change the record. ‘Now this song – “To Gather the Bones” – is really special,’ she says.

It sounds to Frank like more of the same. Jingle-jangle guitars and is that a recorder? Privately he thinks those Edwardians would’ve done well to let the songs die out, or the singer here would’ve done well not to go digging in the archive. It’s about a young woman, murdered by her husband, whose lover has to bring her back to life. The chorus is insistent; it lodges in his brain.

 

Flesh will spoil and blood will spill but true love never dies

Gather the lady’s bones with love to see the lady rise

 

As the verses play out – something to do with skeletons, something about true love, something about witches – an idea begins to take shape. It is almost ready to shoot down Frank’s arm and on to the page but then Cora sighs, ‘So romantic,’ and he seizes the moment. Shyly, he shows her his sketch.

‘You’ve done me as Elinore from the song!’ she says. ‘The music spoke to you.’

‘Not just the music.’ He leans forward.

On the beanbag, Lal snores, his breath surely flammable. Firelight renders Cora’s skin in jungle stripes of dirty gold. A lump of coal jumps from the fire and crackles on the hearth.

 

Flesh will spoil and blood will spill but true love never dies

Gather the lady’s bones with love to see the lady rise

 

‘Cora. You must know how lovely you are?’

This time when Frank catches her hair, he winds it around his finger, bringing their faces closer together.

The idea, if it’s any good, will still be there in the morning.

Chapter 10

Vale of Health, London NW3
1972

FRANK UP

 

‘Darling!’

Frank opens his eyes to see a flushed Cora shaking him awake.

‘Frank! Someone’s found the skull! You’ve got a journalist calling to interview you in a moment and the book’s going to be reprinted again. That’ll make it the twenty-sixth reprint!’ She gives him a kiss that’s longer than it needs to be and he can sense what’s on offer but she knows what he wants to do first. ‘Go on,’ she says. ‘Go and tell him.’

Frank runs downstairs to break the news to Lal.

Not many brides would put up with their husband’s best man being a lodger in the new marital home, but nothing fazes Cora. Frank likes having Lal around, not just for the company, but as a witness to his success. Perhaps it will even kick Lal into touch: show him that it takes more than just talent, it takes hard work and application of that talent.

 

LAL DOWN

 

Five postbags today. Lal’s got a callus on his forefinger from wielding the letter-opener. He has a list of wrong answers, but not a list of right ones; if he’s never heard them, they go straight to Frank. He can’t be trusted not to blow the secret, apparently.

He starts the response, always done in mirror writing as a little compensation prize. Lal’s left handed and has a flair for looking-glass letters and now he can forge Frank’s hand as easily as he can form his own.

His life is this house, that book, the pub, Mass on Sunday, the odd girl. Although lately he seems to be drawn to types who criticise his drinking. English girls can be so uptight.

It stings that he doesn’t know the secret. Frank is wrong not to trust him. He can drink till dawn and still make it to Mass on Sunday morning. No matter how big the previous evening’s session, he hasn’t missed a Sunday or a Holy Day of Obligation since he left home. What’s that if not an example of a man who can hold his drink?

Sure at the end of the day, Lal’s happy for Frank. He really is. If The Golden Bones had been his idea he knows he’d have looked after Frank the way Frank’s looked after him.

Chapter 100

Nobody is suspicious when Cora abruptly loses interest in pottery.

‘That’s just her way, isn’t it?’ she overhears Frank tell Marcelle, a week or so after the show. ‘She flits from one medium to another one, gets bored as soon as she’s mastered the skill.’

And if this time she doesn’t take up another project immediately, no one thinks too hard about that, either. The success of Intimacies and Lal’s progress in rehab means that no one is really thinking about the wives.

Dominic believes he knows differently. He presumes she can’t face the studio and of course she doesn’t want to set foot in the place, knowing what is happening inside the kiln, but that is only part of the reason. Cora stops making because her work might not sell for six figures and it might not be fashionable but it comes from the heart, so how could her secret not leak out in her art? It would be like painting with blood, weaving with entrails, making jewellery from a young woman’s bones.

When she was a child, Cora was often praised for being a good girl. She was quiet and undemanding, in the corner with her crayons. The grown-ups never understood that she wasn’t good – she wasn’t there. She was up the Faraway Tree or carving arrows from branches in Sherwood Forest, or prowling a Cretan labyrinth with a mirrored shield. For as long as she can remember, it has been easier – necessary, even – for her to have at least one foot in another world.

But now she has passed into a new realm from which there is no going back. She lives in a place inhabited only by those who have taken another human life. It is a superterranean Hades that is superimposed on the world where the innocent live, a club so secret even its members do not know each other. When she is in any kind of crowd she will look at the assembled strangers and wonder who else walks this world with her. She is plagued by elaborate fantasies that one day a vengeful – or maybe just bored – god will decide to expose them all. Cora and the other murderers will look up to see a swirling stormcloud above their heads. Nobody can explain the phenomenon, and the murderers aren’t letting on. Sometimes they allow a brief moment of recognition in the street and the expression is always the same. You? Really? I’d never have guessed.

Eventually the connection is made between the clouds that hang over convicted killers and the disproportionate number of cloud people who have a missing person in their lives. The cloud people are rounded up and imprisoned without trial. Cora’s imagination incarcerates them in a motte-and-bailey castle. Their collective clouds merge to form one huge navy-blue cumulonimbus that hangs so low it soaks their clothes and hair.

And this is just Cora’s daydream. The nightmares wake her up as though someone has placed electric paddles on her chest. When she sleeps, it is not a thunderbolt that marks the killers but their victims. The waitress begins to follow Cora wherever she goes. Cora has forgiven the girl for sleeping with Frank; she sees now that she too was a victim long before Cora got to her. The waitress is not a staggering zombie; she looks just as she did when she was serving drinks – unless Cora is unlucky enough to glimpse the back of her head, and there she will find a mosaic of broken skull and what looks like hot red tar embedded in the girl’s bright gold hair.

Thank goodness for Dominic. She must have done something right to raise a young man like him. By standing within the circle of her guilt, he has shown her that the true fault lies without it. She clings to it, the knowledge that none of this would have happened if it weren’t for Frank, when her imagination gets the better of her.

When the night terrors shake Cora awake, and she sits up in bed, her heart pounding fit to displace a rib, she looks at Frank beside her and she visualises the burden passing from her body into his. One day, she will find a way to make him pay for what he has turned her into.

Chapter 101

Dom isn’t sure when he first experiences respite from thinking about Verity. Even in the magic of those early weeks with Rose, she is there, a rotting corpse sharing the bed with them. But about a month in, he realises that the book he’s reading is actually going in and the letters are no longer sliding off the page to be replaced by images of cracked skulls and glassy blue eyes. When the conkers and acorns start to carpet the Heath there comes a morning when he wakes up and it’s a matter of minutes rather than seconds before he sees her face or imagines quite what stage of decomposition she will be at by now. By Christmas, he can go for hours at a time without thinking about what he has done. He dares to hope that, in the future, he might make it through a whole day.

Dom doesn’t enact the final part of his plan until the following autumn. He has followed Rose to the University of Sussex, where they share a little cottage just outside Brighton, but there’s a weekend when both sets of parents are away from the Vale. Under the pretence of going to a careers fair, he drives up to London. When he opens the kiln again he braces for the smell, his forearm a barrier under his nose, but while it’s not fragrant it no longer smells like rotting flesh. It’s boggy and stagnant, rather like the lake at the bottom of the Vale. He opens the lid of the drum to find it is full of a greeny-brown slurry, which he siphons off and tips on to the rose bed outside Cora’s studio door. Here and there are traces of the flesh that held the bone together, but under the tap they come away like wet tissue paper. When Dom has finished, there is a beautifully clean skeleton, her only imperfection a spiderweb crack in the back of the skull. A horrible thought comes to him: this is what Rose looks like underneath. He feels a surge of protectiveness for her.

He spreads the bones on the stone table, out of sight of the security cameras. It’s a warm day and they are touch-dry in an hour. He places them in a big blue IKEA bag, carries them gently up the stairs and unscrews Gertrude from her frame on the wall. He staggers into his bedroom and sets the frame on the floor before unhinging the glass front. If he had his parents’ artistic flair he could sketch the arrangement for reference, but he has to rely on his memory. He unpins Gertrude from her red velvet backing, replacing the fake bones with real ones. It is painstaking work involving wires and pins. The teeth are a problem. Those gaps and fillings are distinctive. But Gertrude’s head had been arranged at an angle, tilted down so she appeared to be gazing at her left shoulder, and by the time Dominic has finished he reckons you’d have to know what you were looking for to see it.

Actual Gertrude, the horror-film fibreglass girl, he burns in the garden, in the brazier where he macerated Verity’s corpse. It makes a chemical stench that half-blinds him and fucks up his lungs so badly that when he gets back to the cottage in Sussex, he can barely manage the stairs.

 

The following spring, everyone remarks on what a good year it is for the roses outside the studio. Fat, double-headed blooms that last well into the autumn. Dom finds them deeply unsettling but he can’t put his finger on why, apart from the obvious. In the end it comes to him in a nightmare. He wakes up, drenched in sweat and screaming. Beside him, Rose puts a hand on his shoulder, comforting him even in her sleep.

Dom’s already forgotten the narrative of the dream but one image has seared itself into his memory. A single rose petal floating in murky water, the same peachy gold as the flowers that bloom outside Cora’s studio. The last time he saw a colour like that was Verity’s hair, waving like the fronds of a beautiful aquatic plant hand as he pressed her head down under the soap-scented water.

Chapter 102

In summer 1999, Dom moves on to his next task: getting Verity Winship on the missing persons list. Her letters to Frank are one thing, but if no one has reported her missing, the police won’t know whose bones these are. But once they know it’s Verity Winship, well, it’ll be an open and shut case.

All Dominic has to go on is the coded list of names and numbers in the back of an old textbook. While Rose is at a lecture, Dominic sits at their kitchen table and withholds the house phone number before calling. It doesn’t start well: a couple of numbers have been disconnected, one person’s never heard of Verity and another says she still owes them fifty quid and she can fuck off if she thinks she’s crashing at their place again. But Dominic skims the bullseye with his fifth call, the name Hayley and a London number, and tells the woman who answers that he’s looking to trace a Verity Winship.

‘What’s it regarding?’ asks Hayley. There’s a newborn crying in the background.

He’s planned for this. ‘I’m calling from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. She’s due a tax rebate after an overpayment last year.’

‘Verity actually earned enough to pay tax?’ asks Hayley. ‘Well, I never. But I can’t help you. She was only crashing here the odd night. Let’s just say that it wasn’t completely out of character for her not to come home. I’ve still got a bag of her stuff – don’t like to chuck it. You’ve obviously tried Marilyn? Sorry, I don’t know her last name.’

‘She’s next on my list,’ he says, and skips ahead to M. The voice that answers is old and wavery.

‘I’m looking to trace a Verity Winship.’ He gives her his HMRC spiel and gives Hayley’s address as Verity’s last known residence to convince this Marilyn that he knows all about her.

‘I wish I could help you, love. But I’ve not seen her for a good couple of years now. It’s been on my mind, to be honest. She never turned up on Boxing Day, not last year or the one before. She can be very flighty, can Verity, but she’s always popped in on the 26th for a mince pie and a catch-up. Every year since she left.’

‘Since she left . . .’

‘I fostered her for a couple of months, just before she left care. You’re not supposed to have favourites, but some kids you just – you know. She was the last one, as well. Bloody handful, she was. Made me realise I was getting too old for it all.’

He likes that. A foster mother. The police would take that seriously.

‘That’s concerning,’ says Dominic. ‘Have you reported her missing?’

‘I thought about it,’ admits Marilyn. ‘But Verity didn’t like the—’

She seems to remember she’s talking to someone ‘official’. Dom is pretty certain the word she swallowed was ‘police’. The picture he’s building of Verity is someone who lived on the margins.

He chooses his next words carefully. ‘Because if you did, the police might be able to trace her and then I’d know where to send this cheque. I’d do it myself, only it’s a breach of data protection. In fact, I shouldn’t even be telling you this now. Do me a favour, don’t tell them I suggested it. I don’t want to lose my job!’

‘Oh, no. I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble,’ says Marilyn.

‘Well. Let’s hope you find her, and we can send her her rebate.’

‘I will do. Thank you, love.’

He rocks back on the kitchen chair. The conversation has left him hot; there are sweat rings under his arms. That is as far as he dares push it. Marilyn will tell the police Verity is missing. Marilyn will give them Hayley’s number. Hayley has a bag of her things. Dom pictures a hairbrush, matted with strawberry blonde hairs, the roots little white bulbs packed with genetic code that spell out Verity’s name as clearly as letters.

Chapter 103

Vale of Health, London NW3
9 August 2021

For the past half-hour, the duration of Dom and Cora’s confessions, I have been systematically plucking the feathers out of the raspberry-pink sofa cushions. There’s a scene of avian carnage on my lap. The millpond calm I feel must be some kind of mental shutdown. Maybe I’m saving my explosion for when Dom tells me what he did with the jewel. Maybe it’s the need to keep my mouth shut about Bridget and Frank until I know what they know. So far, they haven’t mentioned her once.

Or is it that I am not, in fact, surprised?

Cora as a killer makes an awful kind of sense. With that as my starting point, it’s not too much of a leap to accept Dom covering for her. He’s always been a mummy’s boy; he’s always hated Frank. Why shouldn’t my solid, clever brother be adept at dissolving bodies and pinning them to walls for his family to wander past every day?

‘So for years, what we all thought was Gertrude was really Verity Winship? While we were all eating Sunday lunch down here, while we had your wedding reception in the garden, up there on the landing there were literal human remains?’ My voice has risen to a screech. The purple shadows under Dom’s eyes seem to spread and darken by the second.

‘I am so, so sor—’

‘Save it.’ My sense of calm was short-lived. I would like to hit Dom. I could land a punch as hard as a man’s and I would enjoy it. ‘When I took her down off the wall that time Aoife had a meltdown, I was handling a real dead girl’s bones? Jesus Christ, Dom! No wonder you wouldn’t let your kids play with her. Oh, this is fucked. This is fucked up.’ I start to sweep the feathers into a little pyramid on my lap, a delicate operation at odds with my body’s all-over thrumming of adrenaline. ‘I take it you put her in Lal’s attic?’

‘I could hardly let her be picked up by the bin men, could I?’

‘No, that would never do. Can’t have the bin men upset, can we?’

‘Eleanor . . .’ says Cora weakly, but Dom puts his hand up to show her he can handle me.

‘That day,’ he says. ‘When you’d all gone and Dad was asleep in front of the telly, I took her out of the bin. Lal and Bridget were out so I just thought, I’ll pop her in their attic while I work out what to do with her.’

Pop her in the attic, like she’s a winter coat he won’t be needing for a few months. I edge the pyramid’s base with tiny white feathers as though getting the design right is the most important thing in the world.

‘Verity was up there, what, ten years?’ I ask Dom without looking at him.

‘Give or take.’

‘So why get her out again that day?’

‘I wanted Dad to get the blame for her death. I used to fantasise about it. Seeing his face when he understood what he’d set in motion. Literally fantasise. I’d picture myself unlocking the attic door and—’

He’s seized on the wrong part of the question.

‘No, I get that you wanted to make him pay. I mean, why that day? You told me that working on the app had brought you and Frank together – you were getting on at last.’ I put a little brown feather on the top of the pile. It quivers in a breeze I can’t feel. ‘And even if he was being a monster, you basically risked trashing your own app. I know it turned out to be good publicity but there’s no way you could’ve known that. What was it? Did he make one of his snide remarks?’

God knows we’ve all had that experience.

Dom looks out of the window on to the Vale as though shoring up strength for what’s coming next. ‘It wasn’t something he said. It was something I saw. You were there, Nell. I was on hold to Leelo and Billie put it right down in front of me.’

Leelo, Billie, Dom: I reorientate myself in Cora’s kitchen: a pile of brownies, orange juice, coffee. He means the catalogue and honestly, thank fuck. If they already know about the painting of Bridget, I don’t have to be the one to break it to them.

But someone’s got to say it.

The three of us regard each other warily, knowing there’s something huge to be said and all hoping someone else will be the one to say it, because it will change everything. After ten seconds of loaded silence, it becomes apparent that person is me.

‘The catalogue.’

Putting it out there is like undoing a notch on a too-tight belt. Cora and Dom nod in unison. It’s a reprieve for them too. His shoulders drop. She gives me a watery grimace. ‘Your brother only showed me it last night. Once you see it . . .’

‘If only it could be unseen,’ said Dominic hopelessly. ‘You don’t know how much time over the past week I’ve spent wishing I’d never seen it. That I could un-know it.’

‘Did you know about it at the time?’ I ask Cora.

She shakes her head vigorously. ‘Christ, no. Of course not, I’d never have let it carry on. Never.’ This seems a strange choice of words: as if Cora ever had any control over what Frank did. ‘Dominic told me the day after the b