‘Who do you think it is?’ says Dido, stirring her gin and tonic with her straw.

Miller replies, ‘It’s not someone homeless. There’s not enough stuff. You know. If he was actually living there, there would be lots more things.’

‘So you think it’s someone who just comes occasionally?’ says Libby.

‘That would be my guess.’

‘And so there was someone up there when I was here on Saturday?’

‘That would also be my guess.’

Libby shudders.

‘Look,’ says Miller, ‘here’s what I think. You were born around June 1993?’

‘June the nineteenth.’ A chill goes through her as she says the date. How does anyone know? Maybe it was just made up. By the social services? By her adoptive mother? She feels her grasp on the certainty of herself start to slip and slide.

‘Right. So your brother and sister would have known your date of birth given that they were teenagers when you were born. And if they somehow knew that the house was being held in trust for you until your twenty-fifth birthday, it would make sense that they might want to come back to the house. To see you …’

Libby gasps. ‘You mean, you think it might be my brother?’

‘I think it might be Henry, yes.’

‘But if he knew it was me, and he was there, in the house, why didn’t he come down and see me?’

‘Well, that I do not know.’

Libby picks up her wine glass, puts it briefly to her lips and then puts it down again. ‘No,’ she says, forcefully. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Maybe he didn’t want to scare you?’ suggests Dido.

‘He could have left me a note?’ she says. ‘He could have got in touch with the solicitor and let them know he wanted to meet me? But instead, he’s hiding out in the attic like a weirdo.’

‘Well, maybe he is a weirdo?’ says Dido.

‘What did you find out about him?’ Libby asks Miller. ‘Apart from him being my brother?’

‘Nothing, really,’ says Miller. ‘I know he went to Portman House School from the ages of three to eleven. His teachers said he was a clever boy, but a bit full of himself. He didn’t really have any friends. And then he left in 1988, had a place offered to him at St Xavier’s College in Kensington but didn’t take it up. And that was the last anyone heard of him.’

‘I just don’t get it,’ says Libby. ‘Lurking around, slinking through tunnels and bushes, hiding upstairs when he knew I was downstairs. Are you sure it’s Henry?’

‘Well, no, of course not. But who else would know you were going to be there? Who else would know how to get into the house?’

‘One of the others,’ she answers. ‘Maybe it’s one of the others.’

28

Lucy checks the time on her phone when Michael is briefly distracted by a wasp that is bothering his plate. He flaps at it with his napkin, but it keeps coming back.

It’s nearly three o’clock. She wants to be home by four. She needs the passports, but she also knows that in asking for the passports, she will be quickening the inevitable journey towards Michael’s bed.

She starts to clear their plates. ‘Here,’ she says, ‘let’s get this stuff inside, that’ll get rid of your annoying friend.’

His eyes are glassy and he smiles at her gratefully. ‘Yup,’ he says. ‘Good plan, and let’s get some coffee on too.’

She leads the way into the kitchen and starts to load the dishwasher. He watches her while the coffee machine grinds beans. ‘You really kept your figure, Luce,’ he says. ‘Not bad for a forty-year-old mom of two.’

‘Thirty-nine.’ She smiles tightly and drops two forks into the cutlery basket. ‘But thank you.’

The atmosphere is clumsy, slightly sour. They’ve left it too long for what comes next. They’ve drunk too much, eaten too much, sat for too long in the languorous air of the garden. Lucy says, ‘I need to get back to the kids soon.’

‘Oh,’ says Michael lightly. ‘Marco’s a big boy. He can look after his little sister a while longer.’

‘Yes, sure, but Stella gets a little anxious when she’s not with me.’

She sees his jaw twitch a little. Michael does not like to hear about weakness in others. He abhors it. ‘So,’ he says with a sigh, ‘I suppose you’ll want the passports?’

‘Yes. Please.’

Her heart thumps so hard under her rib cage that she can feel it in her ear canals.

He cocks his head and smiles at her. ‘But don’t rush off just yet? OK?’

He goes to his study and she can hear him opening and closing drawers. He returns a moment later, the passports in a felt drawstring bag in his hand. He waves it at her.

‘I am nothing if not a man of my word,’ he says, walking slowly towards her, his eyes on her, dangling the felt bag in front of him.

She can’t work out what he’s doing. Is he expecting her to snatch them from him? Chase him? What?

She smiles nervously. ‘Thank you,’ she says.

And then he is standing up against her, the small of her back hard against the kitchen counter, the felt bag clutched in his hand, his mouth heading towards the crook of her neck. She feels his lips against her throat. She hears him groaning.

‘Oh, Lucy Lucy Lucy,’ he says. ‘God, you smell so good. You feel so …’ He grinds himself against her. ‘So good. You are …’ He groans again and his mouth finds hers and she kisses him back. That is why she is here. She came here to fuck Michael and now she is going to fuck Michael and she has fucked him before and she can fuck him again, she really can, especially if she pretends he is Ahmed, pretends he is a stranger even, then yes, she can do this, she can do this.

She lets his tongue into her mouth and closes her eyes, tight, tight, tight. And his hands are pushing her up from behind, pushing her up on the counter and he takes her legs and he wraps them around his body, his hands gripping her ankles hard enough to make her wince, but she doesn’t stop, she carries on because this is what she came here to do. Behind them the coffee machine bubbles and hisses. She knocks an empty glass and it rolls across the counter, smashes against the side of the kettle. She tries to move her hand away from the broken glass but Michael is pushing her closer towards it, his hands pushing up the fabric of her skirt, searching for the waistband of her knickers. She tries to move across the counter away from the glass, but she doesn’t want to stop the momentum of what’s happening, she needs it to happen so that it is done, so that she can pull on her underwear and take the passports and go home to her babies. She tries to focus on helping him take off her underwear, but she can feel a shard of glass under her small of her back, pressing into her flesh. She tries one last time to shift herself across the counter and then Michael suddenly pulls away and says, ‘Fucking hell, will you stop fucking wriggling away from me. Fuck’s sake,’ and then he pushes down hard against her and she feels the glass pierce her skin and she jolts forward and shouts out in pain.

‘What the fuck is it now? For fuck’s sake!’

Almost in slow motion she sees his hand coming down towards her face and then she feels her teeth jolt inside her head, her brain slapping off the insides of her skull as he hits her.

And there is blood now, warm blood running from the small of her back. ‘I’m hurt,’ she says. ‘Look. There was glass and …’

But he’s not listening to her. Instead he forces her back on to the counter again, the glass piercing a new section of her back, and then he’s inside her and his hand is over her mouth and this was not how it was going to be. It was going to be consensual. She was going to let him. But now she hurts and there is blood and she can smell the charred meat on his hand, see the blank fury on his face and she just wants the passports, she wants the fucking passports, she does not want this and her hand finds a knife; it’s the knife she used to slice the tomatoes, the knife that cut through their skins like butter, and here it is in her hand and she plunges it into the side of Michael’s body, into the space below the hem of his T-shirt, the soft, tender white part where the skin is like a child’s skin and it goes in so easily she almost doesn’t register that she’s done it.

She sees his eyes cloud over briefly with confusion, then uncloud with realisation. He pulls out of her and staggers backwards. He gazes down at the blood pumping out of the hole in his side and covers it with his hands but the blood keeps pumping out. ‘Fucking Christ, Luce. What the fuck have you done?’ He gazes at her with wide, disbelieving eyes. ‘Help me. Fuck.’