This morning, the run was a necessity for her. She had woken before dawn, in a lather, apprehensive about what she knew she was going to do that day. As she tiptoed downstairs in the pale first light, the house closed in on her, infecting her with its misery.
The night before, she had tried to wait up for Bella, Olly and Marcus to get in. But a day out in the sunshine, the exhaustion following the excitement of the bear episode, and the best part of a bottle of red wine meant that she was woken by Marcus shaking her as she lay stretched out on the sofa, Jack pressed into her side like a sweaty little hot-water bottle.
‘Come on old girl. Bed,’ he said, tobacco and wine on his breath.
‘What’s the time?’ she said.
‘Gone the witching hour.’ He picked Jack up.
‘Where are Bella and Olly?’ She sat up, confused. She remembered waiting supper for everyone, then giving up and eating her own – what little she could manage.
‘Tucked up in bed. I just checked on them. Both sleeping like angels.’
He carried Jack upstairs, leaving her sitting blinking on the sofa in the bare, dusty living room, with its fruited rotten smell.
She got up, stretched, and went through to the kitchen, where she cleared up, put the uneaten food in the fridge and checked the back door was locked, which it was. She added a new refinement to the house security, in the form of a broom and a mop wedged respectively under the back- and front-door handles. Finally she wobbled her way up to bed. By the time she got there Marcus was already asleep, so she didn’t have a chance to ask where he had been all evening.
So, added to her sense of hangover, as she cantered with Dog along the shrouded river road, Lara also had a nagging notion that she was becoming a superfluous member of her family. She tried to work out whether this was a good thing or not.
They reached the barking Rottweiler which, as usual, pelted towards them, only to fall back whimpering as it hit its invisible wall.
‘Ha,’ Lara said. ‘In your face, horrible dog.’
The run was doing its job, lifting the cobwebs from her mind, helping her to look forward to the coming evening when, for the first time in sixteen years, she and Stephen would be fully alone. She tried to think about what this meant for Marcus, but she realised she no longer cared. The past week had been like an intolerably long foreplay, and she was ready to explode. She needed, for once, to do something genuine and true to herself. She checked her arm – the combination for his gate was still there, in Stephen’s hand.
‘Living a lie, living a lie,’ she chanted as she jogged, using her footfall as a rhythm. She usually ran to music, but doing so this morning had made her feel undefended, so she had taken her earphones out.
Without warning Dog stopped, dropped down and snarled. Lara had to halt suddenly to avoid tumbling over the top of him. The object of his attention was a figure standing beside a car about fifty feet ahead, half hidden in the river mist.
‘Hello?’ Lara said. Dog shifted his shoulders and snarled again. The figure stepped towards them, away from her dun-coloured car, and, with a sick rush, Lara clocked the baker boy cap, the mousey hair, the tan and turquoise scarf.
‘Stop. Or I’ll set my dog on you,’ Lara said.
‘I know what you think …’ The voice came loud to her, across the morning air, the kind of voice you can only get after a lifetime of smoking. Elizabeth Sanders took a few more steps forward, so Lara saw the thick, orange foundation on her face.
Dog growled.
‘Good Dog,’ Lara said.
‘But I’ve come to warn you about Molloy.’
‘Oh yes.’ Lara said narrowing her eyes at her, her heart thumping. ‘I know all about your
warnings
, Elizabeth Sanders.’
The woman folded her arms and smiled at her.
‘You think I don’t know what you’re up to?’ Lara said. ‘You can’t scare me.’
‘I can. I
have
scared you. I scared him, too,’ the woman said. ‘He pushed me and I got a little
carried away
.’ She laughed out loud. ‘Nearly finished off the lot of you at the bridge there.’
Lara stood looking at her, safe in the knowledge that if it came to it, she would easily be able to outrun this bulky creature.
‘Says he wants me off you now, but the bastard owes me and now he’s going to pay.’
‘He knows you’re here?’
‘Of course he knows I’m here.’
‘He’s not supposed to know,’ Lara said, anger seizing her. ‘It’ll kill him.’
Sanders laughed. ‘Kill him? He brought me here, honey.’
‘You’re crazy.’ Lara pulled her iPhone out of its armband. ‘He doesn’t want you. He never has. You have this twisted idea you have some sort of relationship with him. But you don’t even know him. Not like I do.’
‘Oh, but I do know him. And what you really don’t know is what you’re getting yourself into, Lara Wayland.’
Taking her courage into her hands, Lara stepped forward with her iPhone and took a photo, right up in Elizabeth Sanders’ face. Then she ran on towards the car and photographed its registration plate.
Sanders charged at her and grabbed her by the neck. She tried to get the iPhone out of her hands, clawing at it with bitten fingernails. But Dog launched himself at her, rounding her up and away from Lara, baring his fangs and snarling.
Lara moved round, away from the car. ‘I’ve got you now,’ she said, waving the phone at her. ‘And, as you’ve done me the favour of revealing yourself to Stephen, I’m going to go to him and let him know. And then we’ll call the police.’
Elizabeth Sanders bellowed with laughter. ‘You are truly the silliest little girl I have ever come across,’ she said. Backing away from Dog and shaking her head, she got into her car, started the engine, and looked up at Lara. ‘I was trying to do you a favour,’ she said, lifting her sunglasses and fixing Lara with a lizard stare. ‘But it’s pissing in the wind with you. You’re blind. Blind, blind, blind, blind. You deserve him. You deserve each other.’
She floored the accelerator and in a second she was gone, leaving nothing but the smell of burning rubber and a deal of smoke in Lara’s mind.
‘Completely fucking mad’ Lara said to Dog, goosebumps on her arms. She was glad for one thing at least, though. Sanders had revealed herself to Stephen, so, at last, Lara could be open with him about her.
She returned her iPhone to its holder and, with Dog loping along beside her, she set off at her top speed, back to the horrible house.
‘I’ll be off then.’
Marcus poked his head round the archway to the kitchen while Lara was leaning forward stretching out after her run and trying to work out her next step.
‘I thought rehearsals didn’t start till eleven?’
‘I’m meeting Selina for a bit of a line bash over breakfast. Great about the shirt coming back,’ he said, as he helped himself to a glass of water.
‘What?’ Lara straightened up and saw that Marcus had his Paul Smith shirt on.
‘The Russki laundromat guy got back in the end, then, I guess?’ Marcus asked, putting his half-empty glass down in a puddle of wet on the kitchen table. ‘Oops, I’m late. Gotta run. Laters.’ He kissed Lara on the top of her head and dashed out of the front door.
As soon as he had left Lara ran upstairs to their bedroom, where Jack was still fast asleep in his nest, and checked the side room. Everything had been changed. The medicines now sat on the low shelf where Jack’s toys had been and the toys had been moved to a top shelf. The pink dress she looked so bulgy in hung on the back of the door, and there, in a neatly folded, ironed pile – in place of Jack’s clothes, which had been flung on to the floor – was the stolen washing. The only thing missing was Stephen’s beautiful shirt.
Horror rising in her throat, Lara ran from room to room to check that whoever had been in the house wasn’t still there. Apart from the usual mess – unmade beds, damp towels heaped up on top of sheets – Olly and Bella’s rooms were empty; they must have gone out early that day with their various local friends. Or at least, that’s what Lara hoped.
After checking the downstairs, she locked the doors and tried to call Stephen, but there was no reply. She thought about driving up to his house right then, but what would she do with Jack? She had no choice but to stay put.
Over the morning, waiting until the moment she could drop Jack off at rehearsal and get up to Stephen’s place, she tried phoning again and again.
There was no answer.
She was just picking up the phone for one more attempt when someone knocked on the front door. She edged into the living room and peered through the window to see a large stocky man standing on the porch.
‘Lara? Hello? It’s Danny,’ he called up at the open first-floor windows above him.
She had completely forgotten that this was the day for the space clearing. Grateful for the presence of another adult, she rushed to the door.
‘Danny. Thank you so much for coming.’
She didn’t know what she had been expecting, but the man standing in front of her wasn’t it. It would be impossible to guess his age – he could have been anything from forty to sixty-five years old. Dressed in smart chinos and an ironed cotton shirt, with a leather satchel over his shoulder and short, silvering black hair, he could easily have been an estate agent arriving to show the house to prospective buyers.
Instead she greeted a Native American shaman come to cleanse the place of negative energy.
He came into in the hallway and looked around.
‘This is the worst part of the house,’ Lara said. ‘I can’t stand it here.’
Danny closed his eyes and stood still, his hands clasped in front of him. After a few minutes, he relaxed and turned to Lara.
‘Show me the other places.’
She took him around the ground floor, explaining the basement to him as they went up the stairs. Then she led him to Olly’s room, where he stood on the threshold and frowned at the greying bedclothes and dirt-caked garments strewn over them.
Then Lara showed him into Bella’s room, where, to her surprise, from underneath what she had taken earlier to be a heap of unmade bedding, her daughter turned her tousled head to confront them.
‘Can’t you knock?’ she said, shielding her eyes from the dusty light that infiltrated her room through the open door.
‘Sorry darling. I thought you weren’t in. Are you all right?’ She went over to put her palm on Bella’s forehead, but it was impossible, in the heat of the room, to gauge whether she had a fever or not. ‘How do you feel?’ she asked, putting her hand on her arm.
‘Pants,’ Bella muttered.
‘It might do you some good to get up and get some fresh air,’ Lara said.
‘Yeah, right.’ Bella pulled the sheet over her head and turned her back to her.
‘Sorry,’ Lara said to Danny, who was looking at the photograph that Lara had propped up on Bella’s window.
‘That’s a photo of poor Jane Larssen,’ Lara said, going over to him. ‘Should I take it down?’
Danny shook his head. ‘That’s not the problem,’ he said.
They finished the tour of the house and went back downstairs. In the living room, over coffee, Danny asked Lara about her family, where they were from and how long they planned to stay. As she answered his questions, Danny watched her and nodded, rubbing his chin between thumb and forefinger. His scrutiny of her put her on edge, as if she were gabbling on too much.
She finished and he finally spoke.
‘Lara. There is a problem with this house, but it is very small, very ancient. It’s almost past history. The big problem isn’t with the building.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The big problem is with you, Lara.’
‘I don’t understand.’
He put his bag on the ground and opened it. He brought out a foot-long bundle of dried twigs and leaves, all tied up with yellow cloth bands.
‘What are you doing?’
He held up his hand to silence her. Using a red plastic lighter from his pocket, he set fire to the end of the bundle, fanning it until the flame took. Then he blew it out and let the smoke rise up between them. He stepped in closer to Lara, who watched, wide-eyed, as he closed his eyes and started to chant something in a language she didn’t recognise. He moved the smouldering twigs all over himself first, along his arms, down and up his own legs, then he turned to her, passing the smoke more slowly over her, taking more time.
‘Breathe it in,’ he said to her between chants.
Lara tried to suppress the urge to cough as she inhaled the herbal smoke. It reminded her of the home-grown spliffs she and Marcus used to smoke before she was pregnant with the twins, or the awful Honeyrose cigarettes he took up for a week when he tried to quit tobacco. Whatever it was, it was heady stuff and it made her light-headed and giddy. She fought not to giggle.
After what seemed like an hour, but which could have been only a few minutes, he pulled away and stood silently in front of her, scrutinising her as if trying to read some small print on her cheek.
Eventually he spoke.
‘I’ve done what I can. The rest is up to you.’
‘What about the house?’
‘I’ll clear it for you if you like. It will help. But it’s only you that can make the real difference.’
He stepped around the house, chanting and moving smoke through what Lara considered to be the problem areas, until his burning bundle was just a stub. Finally he took her by the hand and led her on to the front porch, where he took her into his arms in a fatherly embrace.
‘Open your eyes, Lara,’ he said. ‘Bad things are going to happen unless you are very careful.’
She watched him gather his things to leave.
It was as if he knew.
LARA TRIED CALLING STEPHEN ANOTHER COUPLE OF TIMES, BUT
still got no reply, which did nothing to soothe her mounting sense of unease. After dropping Jack off at the theatre, she left a note and thirty dollars for Bella – who was still moping up in her room – and Olly – who she had not seen for days, it seemed – to get themselves supper from the pizza place. Marcus and Jack had been invited to dinner at the diner with James and Betty after rehearsal. She explained her own absence by claiming to have errands to run in town. She was pretty certain that, so slight was their interest in her comings and goings, they would buy without question such a vague and boring-sounding alibi. In any case, she would probably be home before anyone realised she had gone.