The Family Upstairs(22)

‘Yes,’ Dido agrees. ‘But the house is a curse. I’m glad it’s nothing to do with me.’

Libby nods. A week ago she’d have had no notion of big beautiful houses being curses, now she is closer to understanding.

‘So, tell me about your house? Tell me everything.’

Libby sips her Prosecco, places the glass on the table and then leans back into her chair. ‘I found an article,’ she begins, ‘in the Guardian. About the house. About my parents. About me.’

‘You?’

‘Yes,’ says Libby, rubbing at the points of her elbows. ‘It’s all a bit bizarre. You see, I was adopted as a baby, when I was nearly a year old. The house in Chelsea, it belonged to my birth parents. And according to the article I was born into a cult.’

The word sounds horrible leaving her mouth. It’s a word she’s been trying her hardest to avoid using, to avoid even thinking about. It’s so at odds with the pathetic fantasy she’d spent her life wallowing in. She sees Dido bristle slightly with excitement.

‘What!’

‘A cult. According to this article there was a sort of cult in the house in Chelsea. Lots of people lived there. They were all living spartanly. Sleeping on the floor. Wearing robes that they made themselves. Yet …’ She reaches into her bag and pulls out the printout of the article. ‘Look, this was my mum and dad, six years before I was born, at a charity ball. I mean, look at them.’

Dido takes the article from her hands and looks. ‘Gosh,’ she says, ‘very glamorous.’

‘I know! My mother was a socialite. She ran a fashion PR company. She was once engaged to an Austrian prince. She’s just stunning.’

Seeing her mother’s face had been extraordinary; there was something reminiscent of Priscilla Presley about the dyed black hair and piercing blue eyes. Her mother had lived up to every one of her childhood fantasies, right down to the job in PR. Her father … well, he was very well dressed, but smaller than she’d imagined, shorter than her mother, with a slightly arrogant tilt to his chin but something oddly defensive in the way he looked at the photographer, as though expecting trouble of some kind. He held his arm around Martina Lamb’s waist, the tips of his fingers just visible in the shot; she gripped a silk shawl around her shoulders with ringed fingers and the edges of her hip bone made indents in the fabric of her evening dress. It was, according to the article, the last photo taken of the ‘socialite couple’ before they disappeared from view, only to be found dead on their kitchen floor seven years later.

‘I had a brother and sister,’ she says, feeling the fresh shock propelling the words from her mouth too fast, leaving no gaps between them.

Dido glances up at her. ‘Wow,’ she says. ‘What happened to them?’

‘No one knows. The solicitor seems to think they might be dead.’

And there it is. The heaviest of all the extremely heavy facts that have been weighing her down for days. It lands between them, heavy as a thrown hammer.

‘God,’ says Dido. ‘That’s … I mean, how can that be?’

She shrugs. ‘The police came after a call from a neighbour. They found my parents and some other man dead in the kitchen. They’d committed suicide, some kind of pact. And there was me, ten months old, healthy and well in a cot upstairs. But no sign of my brother and sister.’

Dido falls back into her chair, her mouth agape. She says nothing for a moment. ‘OK.’ She sits forward and clamps her temples with the heels of her hands. ‘So, there was a cult. And your parents carried out a suicide pact with some random man …’

Libby nods. ‘They poisoned themselves with plants they’d grown in the garden.’

Dido’s jaw falls again. ‘Yes,’ she says drily. ‘Of course they did. Fuck. Then what?’

‘There’d been other people living in the house. Possibly another family, with children. But when the police got there, there was nobody. Just the dead bodies and me. All the children had just … disappeared. Never been heard of since.’

Dido shivers and puts a hand to her chest. ‘Including your brother and sister?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘They’d barely been seen in years. The neighbours assumed they were away at boarding school. But no school ever came forward to say they’d been a student there. And one of them must have stayed on in the house after my parents died, because apparently someone had been looking after me for days. My nappy was fresh. And when they took me out of the cot, they found this.’ She takes the rabbit’s foot from her bag and passes it to Dido. ‘It was tucked into my blankets.’

‘For luck,’ says Dido.

‘I suppose so,’ Libby replies.

‘And the other guy who died,’ Dido asks, ‘who was he?’

‘Nobody knows. There was no paperwork to identify him, just his initials on the suicide note. No one reported him missing, no one recognised him from police sketches. The theory is that he was an itinerant. A gypsy, maybe. Which would perhaps explain that.’ She gestures at the rabbit’s foot in Dido’s hand.

‘Gypsies.’ Dido massages the word with relish. ‘Gosh.’

‘And the house, it’s weird. It’s dark. And I was there, on Saturday morning, and I heard something. Upstairs.’