The Family Upstairs(86)

Lucy picks up her phone again and she scrolls through her contacts until she gets to the Gs. She composes a message:

Darling Giuseppe. This is your Lucy. I am missing you so much. I just wanted you to know that I am happy and healthy and well and so are the children and so is Fitz. I won’t be coming back to France. I have a wonderful new life now and want to put down roots. But I will think of you always and forever be so grateful to you for being there for me when my life was out of control. I’d be lost without you. My love, always, Lucy.





68


In the restaurant in Marylebone that evening Libby’s family awaits her.

Lucy, Marco, Stella and Henry.

Marco greets her with an awkwardly dramatic half-hug, his head knocking against her collarbone. ‘Happy birthday, Libby,’ he says.

Stella hugs her gently and says, ‘Happy birthday, Libby. I love you.’

These two children, her brother and sister, have been the greatest gifts of all.

They are wonderful children and Libby puts that down entirely to the woman who raised them. She and Lucy have become very close, very quickly. The small age gap means that often Lucy feels a like great new friend, rather than the woman who gave birth to her.

Lucy gets to her feet. She circles Libby’s neck with her arms and kisses her loudly in the vicinity of her ear. ‘Happy birthday,’ she says. ‘Proper happy birthday. This time twenty-six years ago. God. I thought I was going to split in half.’

‘Yes,’ agrees Henry. ‘She was mooing like a cow. For hours. We had our hands over our ears.’ Then he gives her one of his cautious embraces.

Libby still can’t work Henry out. Sometimes she thinks about Clemency saying that she thought he had a streak of pure evil, and a shiver runs across her flesh. She thinks of what he did, the execution of four people, the mummification of a young woman’s body, the mutilation of a cat. But killing had never been his intention and Libby still believes that if the four children had turned themselves in to the local police that night and explained what had happened, how they’d been so mistreated, imprisoned, that it had been a terrible accident, that they would have been believed and rehabilitated. But that’s not how it had been and they had all made fugitives of themselves and taken their lives off on unimaginable tangents.

Henry is odd, but then he is very open about the fact that he is odd. He still maintains that he did not intentionally lock them into the spare bedroom of his Airbnb rental that night, that he did not take their phones and delete Miller’s recording. He said, ‘Well, if I did I must have been even drunker than I thought.’ And Libby never did find a tracking or listening device on her phone. But then she never changed the passcode on her phone either.

He also denies that he has had cosmetic procedures to make him look like Phin. He says, ‘Why would I want to look like Phin? I’m so much better looking than he ever was.’ He is impatient with the children and slightly flustered by the sudden influx of people into his tightly controlled little world, often grumpy but occasionally hilarious. He has a vague grasp of the truth and seems to live very slightly on the edges of reality. And how can Libby blame him? After everything he’s been through? She would probably live on the edges of reality too if her childhood had been as traumatic as his.

She opens his card to her and reads: ‘Sweet Libby Jones, I am so proud to call you my niece. I loved you then and I’ll love you always. Happy birthday, beautiful.’

He looks at her with a slight flush of embarrassment and this time she doesn’t accept one of his cautious embraces. This time she throws her arms around his neck and squeezes him until he squeezes her back. ‘I love you too,’ she says into his ear. ‘Thank you for finding me.’

And then Miller arrives.

Dido was right.

There was something there.

Despite the fact that Roe double-barrels horribly with Jones, that his mother is rather distant, that his stomach wobbles, that he has too much facial hair, no pets and an ex-wife, there was something there that amounted to more than all of that. And what is a tattoo other than a drawing on skin? It’s not an ideology. It’s a scribble.

Miller abandoned his story for Libby. After the night last summer when she was reunited with her family, he’d taken his notepad and he’d ripped out all the pages.

‘But’, she’d said, ‘that’s your livelihood, that’s your career. You could have made so much money.’

He’d silenced her with a kiss and said, ‘I’m not taking your family away from you. You deserve them much more than I deserve a scoop.’

Now Libby takes the empty seat next to him and greets him with a kiss.

‘Happy Birthday, Lamb,’ he says into her ear.

That’s his nickname for her. She’s never had a nickname before.

He passes her a fat envelope.

She says, ‘What’s this?’

He smiles and says, ‘I would suggest opening it to find out.’

It’s a brochure, glossy and thick, for a five-star safari lodge in Botswana called the Chobe Game Lodge.

‘Is this …?’

Miller smiles. He says, ‘Well, yes, apparently. According to the very forthcoming man I spoke to on reception, their head guide is a man in his early forties called Phin. But he spells it with an F now. Finn. Finn Thomsen.’