By the time they get to the house they are all sweating and the dog is panting.

The wooden hoarding is padlocked. They stand in a row and study the building.

‘Are you sure this is the right house?’ says Marco. ‘How does anyone live here?’

‘No one lives here at the moment,’ she says. ‘But we’re going to go inside and wait for the others to arrive.’

‘But how are we going to get in?’

Lucy breathes in deeply and says, ‘Follow me.’

39

Libby awakes the next morning in a shaft of bright sunlight. She trails her hand across the floor beneath her bed and then across the top of the bedside table trying to locate her phone. It’s not there. The night feels furry and unformed. She sits up quickly and scans the room. It is a small white room and she is on a very low wooden bed with an enormous mattress. And so is Miller.

She instinctively clutches the sheet to her chest before realising that she is dressed; she is wearing the top she had on the night before, and her underwear. She vaguely remembers pulling off her shorts while Miller was in the bathroom and ducking under the cover. She vaguely remembers swilling with toothpaste and can feel it still stuck to her teeth. She vaguely remembers a lot of things.

She is in Phin’s flat.

She is in bed with Miller.

They are both dressed and sleeping top to toe.

Last night Phin poured them glass after glass of wine. And insisted, almost to the point of being a bit weird about it, that they stay.

‘Don’t go,’ he’d said. ‘Please. I only just found you. I don’t want to lose you again.’

And she’d said, ‘You’re not going to lose me. We’re virtually neighbours now. Look!’ And she’d pointed across the river at the noble row of houses where number sixteen sat.

‘Please,’ he’d wheedled, his long eyelashes touching his perfectly coiffed eyebrows. ‘It’s got to be better than sleeping on those manky old mattresses over there. Come on. I’ll make you a delicious breakfast in the morning! I’ve got avocado. That’s what you millennials like, isn’t it?’

‘I prefer eggs,’ Miller had replied.

‘Are you actually a millennial?’ Phin had asked him, eyes narrowed, slightly bitchy.

‘Just,’ Miller had replied. ‘But I missed the avocado moment.’

Libby looks at the time on the alarm clock on the bedside table now and works out that if she leaves in eight minutes she’ll still make it to work by nine o’clock. Which is late, for her, but fine in terms of the phone ringing and customers walking in off the street.

She slides her shorts back on and hauls herself off the low-slung bed.

Miller stirs.

She glances at him.

She sees the suggestion of a tattoo on his upper arm where the sleeve of his T-shirt has ridden up. She can’t bear tattoos. Which makes dating particularly awkward in this day and age. But he looks sweet, she can’t help observing. Soft and appealing.

She pulls her gaze from his sleeping form and tiptoes to the en-suite bathroom she vaguely remembers using very late last night. In the mirror she looks reasonably unscathed. The previous morning’s blow dry has survived all the subsequent adventures. She swills again with toothpaste and gargles with tap water. She pulls her hair back into a ponytail and finds a can of deodorant in the bathroom cabinet.

When she comes back into the bedroom Miller is awake.

He smiles at her. ‘Good morning,’ he says. He stretches his arms above his head and she sees the full extent of his tattoo. It’s some kind of Celtic thing. It could be worse.

‘I’m going now,’ she says, picking up her handbag.

‘Going where?’

‘Work,’ she says.

‘God, are you really? You don’t think your boss would give you the morning off?’

She pauses. Of course she would give her the morning off. But Libby doesn’t work like that. It makes her feel edgy just thinking about it.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I want to go to work. I’ve got a big day. Some client meetings in the diary.’

‘You don’t want to let people down?’

‘I don’t want to let people down.’

‘Well,’ he says, throwing back the sheet, revealing the fact that he is wearing red and blue jersey boxer shorts and has solid rugby player legs, ‘give me thirty seconds and I’ll come with you.’

‘You don’t know where my phone is, do you?’ she asks.

‘No idea,’ he says, hauling himself out of bed and pulling on his trousers.

His hair is nuts. His beard is also nuts. She stifles a smile. ‘Are you going to, you know, check your reflection?’

‘Should I?’ He looks confused.

She thinks of the time and says, ‘No. You look fine. Let’s go and find our phones and get out of here.’

She puts her hand on the door handle and pushes it down. The door does not open. She pushes again. Again, it does not open. She pushes it four more times.

Then she turns to Miller and says, ‘It’s locked.’

40

CHELSEA, 1991

David kept Phin shut up in his room for a week after the night he pushed me in the river. A whole week. I was glad in some ways because I couldn’t bear to look Phin in the eye. He had pushed me in the river, but what I had done was much, much worse.

But mainly I just ached. I ached with remorse, with regret, with fury, with helplessness and with missing him. Phin’s meals were brought to him and he was allowed toilet visits twice a day, his father hovering outside the door with his arms folded across his stomach like a malevolent bouncer.

The atmosphere in the house during those days was ponderous and impossible to read. Everything emanated from David. He radiated a terrible dark energy and everyone avoided angering him further, including me.

One afternoon during Phin’s incarceration, I sat with Justin, sorting herbs with him. I glanced up at the back of the house towards Phin’s window.

‘Don’t you think it’s bad’, I said, ‘that David’s locking Phin up like that?’

He shrugged. ‘He could have killed you, mate. You could have died.’

‘Yeah, I know. But he didn’t. I didn’t. It’s just … wrong.’

‘Well, yeah, it’s probably not how I’d do things, but then I’m not a dad, I don’t know what it’s like to have kids. David’s just doing “his job”, I guess.’ He made quotes in the air as he said these words.

‘His job?’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you know, having ultimate control over absolutely everything.’

‘I hate him,’ I said, my voice breaking unexpectedly.

‘Yeah, well, that makes two of us.’

‘Why don’t you leave?’

He glanced first at me and then at the back door. ‘I intend to,’ he whispered. ‘But don’t tell a soul, OK?’

I nodded.

‘There’s a smallholding. In Wales. This woman I met at the market told me about it. They’re looking for someone to set up a herb garden. It’ll be like here, free board and lodging and all that. But no fucking dick-swinging overlords.’ He rolled his eyes towards the house again.

I smiled. Dick-swinging overlord. I liked it.

‘When are you going?’

‘Soon,’ he said. ‘Really soon.’ He looked up at me, quickly. ‘Want to come with?’

I blinked. ‘To Wales?’

‘Yeah. To Wales. You can carry on being my little apprentice buddy.’

‘But I’m only fourteen.’

He didn’t say anything, just nodded and continued tying the herbs.

It wasn’t until a little later that the significance of what he’d said hit me. He was not inviting me to Wales to be his little apprentice buddy; he wasn’t inviting me because he needed me. He was inviting me because he thought I’d be safer there than in my own home.

Justin disappeared two days later. He told nobody he was going and left so early in the morning that even David had yet to wake up. Having learned a lesson about telling tales from what had happened with Phin, I told nobody about the Welsh smallholding. I got the impression he didn’t want anyone to know where he was going. I walked into his room later that day. He’d arrived with very little, and left with even less. I walked to the windowsill where all his books sat in a row.

The Modern Book of Witchcraft and Spells.

Wicca for Beginners.

Wicca Book of Herbal Spells.

I felt sure he’d left them for me on purpose.

I glanced out into the hallway and, having ascertained that there was nobody about, I bundled the books under my jumper.

I was about to run back to my bedroom when my eye was caught by something else on his bedside table. Something small and furry. I thought at first it was a dead mouse, but upon inspection I found it to be a disembodied rabbit’s foot attached to a small length of chain. I had a vague idea that it was supposed to be lucky in some way, like heather and four-leaved clovers. I jammed it quickly into my pocket and ran to my bedroom where I slid everything under my mattress.