The Turn of the Key(79)

The smell of frying bacon hit me instantly.

“Hello?”

I put Petra down cautiously on the bottom stair, shut the door, and prized off my muddy boots.

“Hello? Who’s there?”

“Oh, it’s you.” The voice was Rhiannon’s, and as I picked up Petra and began to make my way through to the kitchen, she came out of the doorway, holding a dripping bacon sandwich in one hand. She looked terrible, green around the gills and with dark shadows under her eyes as if she’d slept even less than me.

“Oh, you’re back,” I said unnecessarily, and she rolled her eyes and stalked past me to the stairs, taking a great bite of sandwich as she did.

“Hey,” I called after her as a blob of brown sauce hit the tiled floor with a splat. “Hey! Take a plate, can’t you?”

But she was already gone, loping up the stairs towards her room.

As she passed though I caught a whiff of something else—low and masked by the scent of bacon, but so odd and out of place, and yet so familiar, that it stopped me in my tracks.

It was a sweet, slightly rotten smell that jerked me sharply back to my own teenage years, though it still took me a minute to pin down. When the association finally clicked into place, though, I was certain—it was the cherry-ripe reek of cheap alcohol, leaching out of someone’s skin, the morning after it’s been drunk.

Shit.

Shit.

Part of me wanted to mutter that it was none of my business—that I was a nanny and had been hired for my expertise with younger children—that I had no experience with teenagers, and no idea of what Sandra and Bill would consider appropriate. Did fourteen-year-olds drink now? Was that considered okay?

But the other part of me knew that I was in loco parentis here. Whether or not Sandra would be concerned, I had seen enough to worry me. And there were plenty of red flags about Rhiannon’s behavior. But the question was, what should I do about it. What could I do about it?

The questions nagged at me as I made myself and Petra a sandwich and then put her down for her nap. I could go and question Rhiannon—but I was pretty sure she’d have a ready excuse, assuming she deigned to talk to me.

Then I remembered. Cass. If nothing else, she would be able to explain the exact sequence of the night’s events to me, and maybe give me an idea of whether I was ascribing more to this than I should. A bunch of fourteen-year-old girls at a birthday party . . . it wasn’t impossible Cass had supplied some alcopops herself, and Rhiannon had just drunk more than her fair share.

Cass’s return text was still in my list of messages, and I scrolled down until I found it, and pulled out the number. Then I waited while it rang.

“Yup?” The voice was rough, and Scottish, and very male.

I blinked, looked at the phone to check I had dialed the right number, and then put it back to my ear.

“Hello?” I said, cautiously. “Who is this?”

“I’m Craig,” said the voice. It didn’t sound like a kid, the voice had to be someone at least twenty, maybe older. And it definitely didn’t sound like anyone’s mum, or dad for that matter. “More to the fucking point, who the fuck are you?”

I was too shocked to reply. For a second I simply sat there, mouth open, trying to figure out what to say.

“Hello?” Craig said, irritably. “Hellooo?” And then, beneath his breath, “Stupid cunts wi’ their fucking wrong numbers.”

And then he hung up.

I shut my mouth and walked slowly through to the kitchen, still trying to figure out what had just happened.

Plainly, whoever that number belonged to, it wasn’t Elise’s mum. Which meant . . . well it could have meant that Rhiannon had written it down wrong, except that I had texted that number and got back a confirmation, supposedly from “Cass.”

Which meant that Rhiannon had been lying to me.

Which also meant that very probably, she hadn’t been out with Elise at all. Instead, she had very likely been with Craig.

Fuck.

The tablet was lying on the kitchen island, and I picked it up and tried to compose an email to Sandra and Bill.

The problem was, I didn’t know what to begin with. There was too much too say. Should I start with Rhiannon? Or Maddie’s behavior? Or should I lead with my concerns about the attic? The noises, and the way Jack and I had broken in, and the crazy writing?

What I wanted to tell them was everything—from the dead, rotten smell that still hung in my nostrils, and the broken shards of the doll’s head in the rubbish bin, right through to Maddie’s scribbled prison-cell drawing, and my conversation with Craig.

Something is wrong, I wanted to write. No, scrap that, everything is wrong. But . . . how could I tell them about Rhiannon and Maddie without seeming like I was criticizing their parenting? Let alone, how could I say what I had seen and heard in this house without being dismissed as just another superstitious nanny? How could I expect to persuade someone who hadn’t even seen the inside of that creepy, demented room?

The subject line first then. Anything I could think of seemed either hopelessly inadequate or ridiculously dramatic, and in the end I settled on An update from Heatherbrae.

Okay. Okay. Calm and factual. That was good. Now for the body of the email.

Dear Sandra and Bill, I wrote, and then sat back and nibbled at the fraying edge of the bandage on my finger, trying to think what to put next. First of all, I should tell you that Rhiannon arrived back this morning safe and sound, but I have a few concerns about her account of her trip to Elise’s.