The Family Upstairs(33)

I allowed myself a moment to absorb the full meaning of what had been said.

‘So, they’re staying,’ I said eventually. ‘Forever?’

‘Yes,’ she replied with a small smile. ‘Yes. I hope so.’

‘And we’re poor?’

‘No. Not poor, darling. We’re unburdened. We’re free.’





24


Libby, Miller and Dido search the house from top to bottom looking for a possible means of entry for the mystery sock man. There is a large glazed door at the back of the house, which opens on to stone stairs down to the garden. It is bolted from the inside and, it transpires when they try to open it, also locked. Wisteria grows thickly across the cracks between the door and the doorframe, indicating that it has not been opened in many weeks, maybe even years.

They push at the dusty sash windows, but they’re all locked. They peer into dark corners looking for secret doors but there are none.

They go through all the keys on Libby’s bunch one by one and finally find the one that unlocks the glazed door. But still the door doesn’t budge.

Miller peers downwards through the glass to the outside of the door. ‘It’s been padlocked,’ he says, ‘from the outside. Do you have a small key on that bunch?’

Libby finds the smallest key that she can and passes it to Miller.

‘How would you feel if I were to take out a pane of glass?’

‘Take it out?’ she says. ‘With what?’

He shows her his elbow.

She winces. ‘Go on then.’

He uses the tattered chintz curtain to soften the impact. The glass cracks and comes out in two perfect pieces. He puts his arm through the hole and unlocks the padlock with the tiny key. Finally the door opens, ripping apart the knots of wisteria.

‘Here,’ says Miller, striding out on to the lawn. ‘This is where the drugs were grown.’

‘The drugs that killed Libby’s parents?’ asks Dido.

‘Yes. Atropa belladonna. Or deadly nightshade, in other words. The police found a big bush of the stuff.’

They walk to the bottom of the garden, shady and cool under the canopy of a tall acacia tree. There is a bench here, curved, to follow the shadow of the tree, and facing the back of the house. Even during the hottest summer that London has known in over twenty years, the bench is damp and mildewed. Libby lays her fingertips gently on to the armrest. She pictures Martina Lamb sitting here on a sunny morning, a mug of tea resting where Libby’s fingers lie, watching the birds wheel overhead. She pictures her other hand going to cup her pregnant bump, smiling as she feels her baby kick and roll inside her.

And then she pictures her a year later taking poison with her dinner, then lying down on the kitchen floor and dying for no good reason at all, leaving her baby all alone upstairs.

Libby snatches her hand back and turns abruptly to look at the house.

From here they can see the four large windows that span the back of the drawing room. They can see another four smaller windows above, two in each of the back bedrooms, plus a smaller window in the middle that sits at the top of the landing. Above that are eight narrow windows with eaves, two for each attic bedroom, and a tiny circular window in between where the bathroom is. And then a flat roof, three chimney stacks and the blue sky beyond.

‘Look!’ says Dido, reaching on to her tiptoes and pointing wildly. ‘Look! Is that a ladder there? Or a fire escape?’

‘Where?’

‘There! Look! Just tucked behind that chimney stack, the red one. Look.’

Libby sees it, a glint of metal. She follows it down with her eyes to a brickwork ledge, then a lip above the eaves, then a drainpipe that attaches itself to another brickwork promontory on the side of the house, a short hop across to the adjoining garden wall, then down to a kind of concrete bunker, then to the garden.

She spins round. Behind is dense foliage, bounded by an old brick wall. She pushes an obvious path through it, her feet finding the bare patches in the weeds. The growth is laced with old spider webs which catch on her clothes and in her hair. But she keeps moving. She can feel this course, it’s already in her, she knows what she’s looking for. And there it is, a battered wooden gate, painted dark green, hanging off its hinges, and leading into the overgrown back end of the garden of the house behind.

Miller and Dido stand behind her, peering across her shoulder through the wooden gate. She pushes the gate as hard as she can and peers into the neighbour’s garden.

It’s scruffy and unmanicured. There’s a wonky sundial in the middle of the lawn, and some dusty gravelled paths. There’s no furniture, no children’s toys. And there, down the side of the house, a pathway that seems, from here, to lead directly to the street.

‘I’ve got it,’ she says, touching the padlock that has been snapped open with bolt cutters. ‘Look. Whoever it is that’s been sleeping in the house has been getting in through this gate, across the garden, up on to that concrete thing over there’ – she leads them back into the garden – ‘up on to the garden wall, up the drainpipe on to that platform, see, up there, then up there on to the ledge, and then on to the roof and to the ladder. We just need to work out where that ladder goes.’

She looks at Miller. He looks back at her. ‘I’m not very agile,’ he says.