The Family Upstairs(62)

Libby’s pulse quickens at the prospect of developments in the story. ‘Tonight,’ she says breathlessly. ‘I mean, even …’ She looks up at Dido who is staring intently at her. ‘Now?’ She aims the question at Dido who nods at her furiously and mouths go, go.

‘I can meet you now. Anywhere.’

‘Our café?’ he says.

She knows exactly where he means. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Our café. I can be there in an hour.’

Dido looks at her after she hangs up and says, ‘You know, I think this might be a good juncture for you to take some annual leave.’

Libby grimaces. ‘But—’

‘But nothing. I’ll take on the Morgans and Cerian Tahany. We’ll say you’re ill. Whatever the hell is going on here is more important than kitchens.’

Libby half opens her mouth to say something in support of the importance of kitchens. Kitchens are important. Kitchens make people happy. People need kitchens. Kitchens, and the people who buy them, have been her life for the last five years. But she knows that Dido’s right.

She nods instead and says, ‘Thank you, Dido.’

Then she tidies her desk, replies to two new emails in her inbox, sets her account to Out-of-Office autoreply and heads away from St Albans High Street to the train station.





45




CHELSEA, 1992


By May 1992 our household had curdled and transmogrified into something monstrous. The outside world, filled as it was with meat-eaters and fumes and germs that could not be fought off by sweaty exercise and pretty flowers alone, was sure to bring about the death of David’s precious spawn. So nobody was allowed to go outside. We had vegetables delivered to our door weekly and our larder was filled with enough pulses, grains and beans to feed us for at least five years.

Then one day, shortly before my fifteenth birthday, David ordered us to surrender our shoes.

Our shoes.

Shoes, apparently, even shoes that were not made of dead animals, were bad, bad, bad. They were suggestive of dirty pavements and joyless trudges to evil offices where people made yet more money to lavish upon the already rich whilst leaving the poor in the shackles of government-manufactured deprivation. Poor people in India did not, apparently, wear shoes; therefore, neither should we. All of our shoes were collected together into a cardboard box and left outside the nearest charity shop.

From the day that David took our shoes until the night of our escape two years later, nobody set foot outside our house.





46


Miller is eating when Libby walks into the café on West End Lane.

‘What’s that?’ she asks, hanging her handbag on the back of the chair and sitting down.

‘Chicken and chorizo wrap,’ he replies, wiping some sauce from the corner of his mouth. ‘So good. So, so good.’

‘It’s four o’clock,’ she says. ‘What meal does this constitute?’

He ponders the question. ‘Late lunch? Or early supper? Dunch? Linner? Have you eaten?’

She shakes her head. She’s not eaten since breakfast on Phin’s terrace this morning and neither has she wanted to. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she says.

He shrugs and bites into his wrap again.

Libby orders a pot of tea and waits for Miller to finish eating.

There is something strangely attractive about Miller’s appetite. He eats as though there is nothing else he would rather be doing. He eats, she observes, mindfully.

‘So,’ says Miller, opening up his laptop, typing something into it and then turning it to face Libby. ‘Meet Birdie Dunlop-Evers. Or Bridget Elspeth Veronica Dunlop-Evers, to give her her full name. Born in Gloucestershire in April 1964. Moved to London in 1982 and studied violin at the Royal College of Music. Used to busk at the weekends and then joined a band called Green Sunday with her then boyfriend, Roger Milton. Roger Milton, incidentally, went on to be the lead singer in the Crows.’

He looks at her expectantly.

She stares back blankly. ‘Are they famous?’

He rolls his eyes. ‘Never mind,’ he continues. ‘Anyway, she jobs about with her fiddle for a few years before auditioning for a band called the Original Version. She starts a relationship with a man called Justin Redding and brings him into the band as a percussionist. According to interviews from the time, she was quite controlling. Nobody liked her. They had their big number one in the summer of 1988 and then released one more single with her and Justin, but when that tanked, she blamed everybody else, had a hissy fit and left, taking Justin with her. And that is the end of Birdie Dunlop-Evers’s internet life story. Nothing since. Just …’ He uses his hand to describe something falling off a cliff.

‘But what about her parents?’

‘Nothing. She was one of eight children, from a big posh Catholic family. Her parents are still alive, as far as I can tell – at least, I’ve found nothing to suggest that they’re not – and there are dozens of posh little Dunlop-Everses out there playing musical instruments and running vegan home-delivery services. But for whatever reason, her family didn’t notice or maybe just didn’t care that their fourth daughter disappeared off the face of the earth in 1994.’

‘And what about her boyfriend? Justin?’