‘You?’

‘Yes,’ says Libby, rubbing at the points of her elbows. ‘It’s all a bit bizarre. You see, I was adopted as a baby, when I was nearly a year old. The house in Chelsea, it belonged to my birth parents. And according to the article I was born into a cult.’

The word sounds horrible leaving her mouth. It’s a word she’s been trying her hardest to avoid using, to avoid even thinking about. It’s so at odds with the pathetic fantasy she’d spent her life wallowing in. She sees Dido bristle slightly with excitement.

‘What!’

‘A cult. According to this article there was a sort of cult in the house in Chelsea. Lots of people lived there. They were all living spartanly. Sleeping on the floor. Wearing robes that they made themselves. Yet …’ She reaches into her bag and pulls out the printout of the article. ‘Look, this was my mum and dad, six years before I was born, at a charity ball. I mean, look at them.’

Dido takes the article from her hands and looks. ‘Gosh,’ she says, ‘very glamorous.’

‘I know! My mother was a socialite. She ran a fashion PR company. She was once engaged to an Austrian prince. She’s just stunning.’

Seeing her mother’s face had been extraordinary; there was something reminiscent of Priscilla Presley about the dyed black hair and piercing blue eyes. Her mother had lived up to every one of her childhood fantasies, right down to the job in PR. Her father … well, he was very well dressed, but smaller than she’d imagined, shorter than her mother, with a slightly arrogant tilt to his chin but something oddly defensive in the way he looked at the photographer, as though expecting trouble of some kind. He held his arm around Martina Lamb’s waist, the tips of his fingers just visible in the shot; she gripped a silk shawl around her shoulders with ringed fingers and the edges of her hip bone made indents in the fabric of her evening dress. It was, according to the article, the last photo taken of the ‘socialite couple’ before they disappeared from view, only to be found dead on their kitchen floor seven years later.

‘I had a brother and sister,’ she says, feeling the fresh shock propelling the words from her mouth too fast, leaving no gaps between them.

Dido glances up at her. ‘Wow,’ she says. ‘What happened to them?’

‘No one knows. The solicitor seems to think they might be dead.’

And there it is. The heaviest of all the extremely heavy facts that have been weighing her down for days. It lands between them, heavy as a thrown hammer.

‘God,’ says Dido. ‘That’s … I mean, how can that be?’

She shrugs. ‘The police came after a call from a neighbour. They found my parents and some other man dead in the kitchen. They’d committed suicide, some kind of pact. And there was me, ten months old, healthy and well in a cot upstairs. But no sign of my brother and sister.’

Dido falls back into her chair, her mouth agape. She says nothing for a moment. ‘OK.’ She sits forward and clamps her temples with the heels of her hands. ‘So, there was a cult. And your parents carried out a suicide pact with some random man …’

Libby nods. ‘They poisoned themselves with plants they’d grown in the garden.’

Dido’s jaw falls again. ‘Yes,’ she says drily. ‘Of course they did. Fuck. Then what?’

‘There’d been other people living in the house. Possibly another family, with children. But when the police got there, there was nobody. Just the dead bodies and me. All the children had just … disappeared. Never been heard of since.’

Dido shivers and puts a hand to her chest. ‘Including your brother and sister?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘They’d barely been seen in years. The neighbours assumed they were away at boarding school. But no school ever came forward to say they’d been a student there. And one of them must have stayed on in the house after my parents died, because apparently someone had been looking after me for days. My nappy was fresh. And when they took me out of the cot, they found this.’ She takes the rabbit’s foot from her bag and passes it to Dido. ‘It was tucked into my blankets.’

‘For luck,’ says Dido.

‘I suppose so,’ Libby replies.

‘And the other guy who died,’ Dido asks, ‘who was he?’

‘Nobody knows. There was no paperwork to identify him, just his initials on the suicide note. No one reported him missing, no one recognised him from police sketches. The theory is that he was an itinerant. A gypsy, maybe. Which would perhaps explain that.’ She gestures at the rabbit’s foot in Dido’s hand.

‘Gypsies.’ Dido massages the word with relish. ‘Gosh.’

‘And the house, it’s weird. It’s dark. And I was there, on Saturday morning, and I heard something. Upstairs.’

‘What sort of something?’

‘Well, a someone. Someone moving. A cough.’

‘And you’re sure it wasn’t the neighbours?’

‘I suppose it could have been. But it really sounded like it was coming from the top of the house. And now I’m too scared to go back there. I feel like I should just put it on the market and get rid of it and move on. But …’

‘Your brother and sister …?’

‘My brother and sister. The truth. My story. It’s all bound up in that house and if I sell it, I may never find out what really happened.’

Dido stares for a moment at the newspaper article. Then she looks up at Libby.

‘Here,’ she says, tapping at the top of the newspaper article with her fingertip. ‘Him. The journalist.’ She squints at the byline. ‘Miller Roe. He’s your man. You need to get in touch with him. Just imagine how amazed he’ll be after all his months of investigative journalism to suddenly find you in his inbox. Serenity Lamb herself. Complete with actual rabbit’s foot.’

They both fall silent then for a moment and let their gazes drop to the rabbit’s foot where it sits on the garden table in a pool of soft dappled evening light.

Libby takes the article from Dido’s hand and finds the byline. ‘Miller Roe’. An unusual name. Easy enough to google. She pulls her phone from her bag and types it in. In under a minute she has his contact email address at the Guardian. She turns her phone to show it to Dido.

Dido nods sagely. ‘Good work,’ she says. Then she lifts her glass of Prosecco and holds it towards Libby. ‘To Serenity Lamb,’ she says, ‘and to Miller Roe. May one beget the truth about the other.’

16

Lucy is awake at five thirty the next morning. She slides carefully off the bed and the dog jumps down and follows her to the kitchenette, his claws clacking against the linoleum. Giuseppe has put teabags, granulated coffee and a plastic bag of chocolate brioche fingers on the counter. There is also a bottle of milk in the fridge. Lucy puts a pan of water on to boil and then sits for a while on the plastic chair in the corner staring at the curtained window. After a moment she stands and tugs open the curtain, then sits and stares at the building opposite, the dark windows reflecting the orange of the early dawn, the grey walls briefly turned pink. The sky overhead is detergent blue and filled with circling birds. The traffic has not started yet and the only noise is the steady rumble of the water coming to the boil, the whine of the gas flame beneath.

Lucy looks at her phone. Nothing. The dog is staring at her meaningfully. She opens the door to her apartment, quietly opens the back door on to the street and gestures to the dog to go outside. He passes her, lifts his leg against the outside of the building for half a minute, then runs back inside.

Indoors, Lucy pulls her rucksack towards her and unzips an inside pocket. In there is her passport. She flips it open. As she’d suspected, it expired three years earlier. The last time she’d used it was when Marco was two and she and Michael had taken him to New York to meet Michael’s parents. They’d split up shortly afterwards and Lucy hadn’t used it since.

Michael had originally got the passport for her. He’d been booking their honeymoon in the Maldives. ‘Give me your passport, honey,’ he’d said, ‘I need the details.’

‘I don’t have a passport,’ she’d said.

‘Well, you’re going to need to renew it, asap, or there’ll be no honeymoon.’

She’d sighed and looked up at him. ‘Look,’ she’d said. ‘I don’t have a passport. Full stop. I’ve never had a passport.’

He’d stopped then and gazed at her for a moment, the machinations of his mind visible in the space between his top and bottom lips. ‘But …’

‘I came to France as a passenger, in a car. When I was much younger. No one asked to see my passport.’

‘Whose car?’

‘I don’t know. Just a car.’

‘So, like, a stranger’s car?’

‘Not quite. No.’

‘But what was the plan? If they’d asked you for a passport, what would you have done?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘So how have you been living? I mean …’

‘Well, like you found me,’ she’d replied tersely, ‘playing a fiddle for cents. Paying by the night for lodgings.’

‘Since you were a child?’