The Turn of the Key(39)

“I’ll be in meetings all day, but I’ll call before bedtime,” Sandra said, her voice slightly softer now. “I’m sorry I didn’t manage to speak to the girls before bed, but we were having dinner with a client. And anyway, it probably would have unsettled them. I find it’s better to be out of sight, out of mind at first.”

“Yes,” I said. “Sure. I can appreciate that.”

“Well, good night, Rowan. Sleep tight. I’m sure you will; you’ll have an early start tomorrow, I’m afraid!”

She gave another laugh. I made myself echo it, though in truth I was feeling anything but amused. The idea of starting all this all over again at 6:00 a.m. was giving me a kind of sick feeling. How had I ever thought I could do this?

Remember why you’re here, I thought grimly.

“Yes, I’m sure I will,” I said, trying to infuse a smile into my voice. “Good night, Sandra.”

I waited—but there was no click, or any sign that she had hung up, or closed the app.

“S-Sandra?” I said uncertainly, but she seemed to be gone. I slumped back in my chair, and ran my hand over my face. I felt exhausted.

“I should be going,” Jack said awkwardly, evidently taking my gesture as a hint. He stood, pushing back his chair. “It’s late, and you’ve an early start, I’d imagine, with the girls tomorrow.”

“No, stay,” I looked up at him, suddenly desperate not to be left alone in this house of hidden eyes and ears and speakers. The company of a person—a real, flesh-and-blood person, not a disembodied voice, was irresistible. “Please. I’d rather have someone to eat with.” A whiff of something burning came from the oven, and I suddenly remembered the pizza. “Have you eaten?”

“No, but I won’t take your supper.”

“Of course you will. I put a pizza in the oven just before you arrived. It’s probably burnt by now, but it’s huge. I won’t manage it all myself. Please, give me a hand, honestly, I want you to.”

“Well . . .” He glanced at the utility room door, towards the garage, and, I assumed, his little flat above, its windows dark. “Well . . . if you insist.”

“I do.” I put on oven gloves and opened the door of the hot oven. The pizza was done. Overdone, in fact, the cheese crisping and charred around the edges, but I was too hungry to care. “Sorry, it’s a bit blackened. I completely forgot about it. Do you mind?”

“Not at all. I’m hungry enough to eat a horse, let alone a slightly burnt pizza.” He grinned, the tanned skin of his cheeks crinkling.

“And I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I need a glass of wine. You?”

“I wouldn’t say no.”

He watched as I chopped the pizza into slices and found two glasses in the cupboard.

“Are you okay with eating off the board?” I asked, and he gave another of his wide grins.

“I’m more than okay. It’s you who’s taking the risk. I’ll gobble all your dinner if it’s not safely ring-fenced, but if you’re fine with that, it’s not my lookout.”

“I’m more than okay too,” I said, and to my surprise, I found myself returning his grin with a slightly shy smile of my own, but a real one, not the forced, watery attempt of earlier tonight.

There was silence for a few minutes as we both worked our way through a greasy, delicious slice each, and then another. At last Jack picked up his third and spoke, balancing it on his fingertips, angling the slice so that the grease dripped back onto the board.

“So . . . about what you were asking earlier.”

“The . . . the supernatural thing?”

“Aye. Well, the truth is, I’ve not seen anything myself, but Jean, she’s . . . well, not superstitious exactly. But she loves a good yarn. She’s always filling the kids’ heads with folk tales—you know, selkies and kelpies, that sort of thing. And this house is very old, or parts of it are, anyway. There’s been the usual amount of deaths and violence, I suppose.”

“So . . . you think Jean’s been telling the girls stuff and they’ve been passing it on to the nannies?”

“Maybe. I wouldn’t want to say for sure either way. But, look, those other nannies were very young, most of them, at least. It’s not everyone who’s cut out to live in a place like this, miles away from a town or a bar or a pub. Au pairs, they don’t want to be here, they want to be in Edinburgh or Glasgow, where there’s nightclubs and other people who speak their own language, you ken?”

“Yeah.” I looked out of the window. It was too dark to see anything, but in my mind’s eye I saw the road, stretching away into darkness, the miles and miles of rolling hills, the mountains in the distance. There was silence apart from the rain. Not a car, not a passerby, nothing. “Yeah, I can understand that.”

We sat in silence for a moment. I don’t know what Jack was thinking, but I was filled with a mix of strange emotions—stress, tiredness, trepidation at the thought of the days stretched out ahead of me, and something else, even more unsettling. Something that was more about Jack, and his presence, and the scatter of freckles across his broad cheekbones, and the way his muscles moved beneath the skin of his forearm as he folded the final pizza slice into a neat parcel and finished it off in two quick bites.