The Turn of the Key(87)

I walked back across the room and picked it up.

It was a hank of white caterers’ string, doubled and tripled up, and tied with a granny knot that was suddenly horribly familiar. And it had been cleanly severed—snipped in half by a very sharp knife, or perhaps the very pair of pruning shears I had rescued from the poison garden.

Whichever it was, it didn’t really matter now.

What mattered was that it was the hank of string I had wound around the poison garden gate, too high for little hands to reach—the string I had put there to keep the girls safe. But what was it doing in Jack’s kitchen? And why was it lying next to that innocent-looking flower?

As I pulled out my phone and opened up Google, there was a sick fluttering feeling in my chest, as if I already knew what I was going to find. Purple flower poisonous I typed into the search bar, and then clicked on Google Images, and there it was, the second image, its strange drooping shape and bright purple color totally unmistakable. Aconitum napellus (monkshood), I read, the feeling of sickness growing inside me with every line. One of the most toxic flowers native to the UK. Aconitine is a potent heart and nerve toxin, and any part of the plant, including stems, leaves, petals, or roots, can be deadly. Most deaths result from ingesting A. napellus, but gardeners are advised to use extreme caution in handling cuttings, as even skin contact can cause symptoms.

Underneath it was a list of deaths and murders associated with the plant.

I shut down the phone, and turned to look at Jack, unable to believe it. Had it really been him, all along?

Him in the locked garden, pruning the poisonous plants, keeping that horrible place alive.

Him undoing the safety measures I had set up to try to protect the children.

Him, carefully selecting the most poisonous blossom he could find and leaving it lying in the middle of the kitchen floor. All I had done was handle it—but it could so easily have been found by the children, or even one of the dogs.

And I had just fucked him.

But why? Why would he do it? And what else was he responsible for?

Had he been the person who hacked into the system to jolt us all out of our beds in the middle of the night with deafening music and terrified screams?

Was he the one who had been setting off the doorbell, jerking me from sleep, and keeping me awake with the terrifying creak, creak of stealthy footsteps?

And worst of all, had he been the one who wrote those horrible things in the locked attic room, and then boarded up after himself, only to “rediscover” it when the time was right?

I found that my breath was coming quick and short, my hands shaking as I shoved the phone back into my pocket, and suddenly I had to get out, get away from him at all costs.

Not troubling now to be silent, I flung open the door to the flat, and stepped out into the night, slamming it behind me. It had started to rain again, and I ran, feeling the rain on my cheeks, the tightness in my throat, and the blurring of my eyes.

The utility room door was still unlocked, and I let myself in, leaning back against the door and using my T-shirt to wipe my eyes, trying to get a hold of myself.

Fuck. Fuck. What was it about me and the men in my life? Why were they such shits, all of them?

As I stood there, trying to calm my gulping breath, I remembered the faint sound I’d heard before, as I was dressing. The house was just as I’d left it: no sign of Rhiannon’s high heels kicked off in the hallway, or handbag abandoned on the bottom step of the stairs. But I hadn’t really expected that. I would have heard a car pulling up. It had probably been one of the dogs.

I wiped my eyes again, peeled off my shoes, and walked slowly through to the kitchen, feeling the faint warmth of the underfloor heating striking up through the concrete. Hero and Claude were curled sleepily in their baskets, snoring quietly. They looked up as I came in, and then laid their heads wearily back down as I sat at the breakfast bar, put my head in my hands, and tried to decide what to do.

I could not go to bed. No matter what Jack had said, Rhiannon was still missing, and I couldn’t just forget that fact. What I should do—what I needed to do, in fact—was write an email to Sandra. A proper one, explaining everything that had happened.

But there was something else I had to do first.

For the more I thought about it, the more Jack’s behavior did not add up. It wasn’t just the poison garden—it was everything. The way he was always hanging around when things went wrong. The fact that he seemed to have keys to every room in the house and access to parts of the home-management system that he shouldn’t. How had he known how to override the app that night when the music came screaming out of the speakers? How had he just happened to have a key to the locked attic door?

And whatever he said, he was, after all, a Grant. What if there was some connection I was missing? Could he be some long-lost relative of Dr. Kenwick Grant, come back to drive the Elincourts out from his ancestral home?

But no—that last what-if was too much. This wasn’t some nineteenth-century peasant’s revenge drama. What would Jack gain from driving the Elincourts out of their own home? Nothing. All he’d get would be another English couple in their place. And besides, it wasn’t the Elincourts who seemed to be targeted. It was me.

Because the fact was that four nannies—five if you counted Holly—had left the Elincourts. No, not left; they had been systematically driven away, one by one. And I might have believed that Bill’s roving hands were responsible, if it hadn’t been for my own experiences in Heatherbrae House. Someone in this house, someone or something, was driving the nannies away, in a deliberate and sustained campaign of persecution.