The Turn of the Key(92)

But you don’t need me to finish the sentence, do you, Mr. Wrexham? You know why. At least, I imagine you do, if you’ve read the papers. You know, because the police know. Because they found out. Because they put two and two together, as you are very possibly doing, even now.

You know that the reason I would never sleep with Bill Elincourt was because he was my father too.





I told you, Mr. Wrexham, didn’t I, that I wasn’t even looking for a job when I stumbled across the advert? In fact I was doing something totally different, something I’d done many times before.

I was googling my father’s name.

I’d always known who he was, and for a while I’d even known where he was—a fancy semidetached house in Crouch End, with electric gates that slid automatically across the driveway, and a shiny BMW on the forecourt. I had been there once in my midteens, under the cover of a pretended shopping trip to Oxford Street with a friend. I remember the taste in my mouth, the way my hands shook when I showed the bus driver my travel card, every step of the walk from Crouch End Broadway.

I stood outside that gate for a long time, consumed with a strange mix of fear and anger, too afraid to ring the bell and face up to the man I’d never met, the man who had walked out when my mother was nine months pregnant.

He sent checks for a while, but he wasn’t on my birth certificate, and I suppose my mother was too proud to pursue him and force him to pay.

Instead, she picked herself up, got a job in an insurer’s firm, and met the man she eventually married. The man—the message was very clear—that she should have been with all along.

And so, when I was six, we moved into his boxy little house.

It was their home. Hers and his. It was never mine. Not from the day I moved into the little room above the stairs and was told sharply not to scuff my suitcase on the hall baseboards. Not until the day I packed a different, larger suitcase and moved out, twelve long years later.

It was their home, but I—I was always there to spoil it for them. This living, breathing, constant reminder of my mother’s past. Of the man who had left her. And every day, she had to look at me staring at her over the breakfast cereal with his eyes. When she brushed my thick, wiry hair into a ponytail, it was his hair she brushed, not her own fine, flyaway stuff.

For that was all I had from him. That, and the necklace he had sent me on my first birthday, the last contact I had from him. A necklace with my initial on it—R for Rachel.

Cheap, nasty rubbish, my mother had called it, but that didn’t stop me from wearing it all the hours I was allowed. At weekends, at first, and every day in the holidays, and then when I began work as an au pair, tucking it beneath my T-shirts and plastic aprons, so that it was always there, the worn metal warm between my breasts.

I was working as a nanny in Highgate when she rang me up and told me. She and my stepfather were selling the house and retiring to Spain. Just like that. It wasn’t that I had any particular affection for that house—I had never been happy there.

But it had been . . . well, if not my home, at any rate, the only place I could call home. “Of course you’re welcome to come and visit,” she said, her voice high and slightly defensive, as if she knew what she was doing, and I think it was that, more than anything, that made me lose it. You’re welcome to come and visit. It was the kind of thing you say to a distant relative, or a friend you don’t particularly like, hoping they won’t take you up on the offer.

I told her to fuck off. I’m not proud of that. I told her that I hated her, that I’d had four years of therapy to try to deal with my upbringing, and that I never wanted to hear from her again.

It wasn’t true. Of course it wasn’t true. Even now, even here, at Charnworth, she was the first person I put on my prison call list. But she’s never called.

It was two days after her announcement that I went back to Crouch End.

I was twenty-two. And I wasn’t angry this time. I was just . . . I was terribly, terribly sad. I had lost the only parent I’d ever known—and my need to replace her with something, however poor and inadequate, was consuming me.

“Hello . . . Bill.” I had practiced the words in my bedroom the night before, standing in front of the mirror. My face was scrubbed clean of makeup, making me look younger and even more vulnerable, though that hadn’t been my intention, and I found that my voice was unnaturally high, as if I wanted to make an appeal to his pity. I didn’t know what kind of daughter he’d want—but I was prepared to try and be that person. “Hello, Bill. You don’t know me, but I’m Rachel. I’m Catherine’s daughter.”

My heart was thudding in my chest as I walked up to the gate and rang the bell, waiting for the gate to slide back, or perhaps the crackle of voices to come over the intercom. But nothing happened.

I tried again, holding the buzzer long and hard, and eventually the front door opened and a small woman in an overall, holding a duster, came out across the shingled drive.

“Hello?” She was in her forties or fifties, and her voice was heavily accented—Polish, I thought, or perhaps Russian. Eastern Europe. “I can help you?”

“Oh . . . hello.” My pulse rate had sped up, until I thought I might possibly faint from nerves. “Hello. I’m looking for Mr.—” I swallowed. “Mr. Elincourt. Bill Elincourt. Is he here?”