She ends the call and looks at Miller.

He looks at her from the corner of his eye and smiles gently. ‘I won’t let anything bad happen to you,’ he says. ‘I’ll make sure you get to work for your next meeting. Alive. OK?’

A wash of affection floods through her. She smiles and nods.

Phin appears with a tray and places it in front of them. Scrambled eggs, smashed avocado sprinkled with seeds, a pile of dark rye toast, a pat of white butter and a jug of iced orange juice. ‘How good does this look,’ he says, handing out plates.

‘It looks amazing,’ says Miller, rubbing his hands together before starting to pile toast on to his plate.

‘Coffee?’ offers Phin. ‘Tea?’

Libby asks for coffee and tops it up with milk from a jug. She picks up a slice of toast but finds she has no appetite.

She looks at Phin. She wants to ask him something about the story he’d told them last night but she can’t quite get a grip on it; it keeps moving out of touching distance. Something to do with a woman called Birdie who played the fiddle. Something to do with a cat. Something to do with a list of rules and a pagan sacrifice and something really very bad to do with Henry. But it’s all so vague that it’s almost, she ponders, as though he’d never told them anything at all. Instead she says, ‘Do you have any pictures of you all when you were children?’

‘No,’ he replies apologetically. ‘Not a one. Remember, there was nothing in the house when we left. My father sold everything, every last shred. And whatever he didn’t sell, he dumped on charity shops. But …’ He pauses. ‘Do you remember a song? From the eighties called … No, of course you won’t, you’re far too young. But there was a song by a band called the Original Version? It was number one for weeks the summer before we came to live in the house. Birdie, the woman I was telling you about last night. She was in the band for a while. Birdie and Justin both were. And the video was filmed in Cheyne Walk. Do you want to see it?’

Libby gasps. Apart from the photo of her parents in their evening clothes in Miller’s Guardian article, this will be the closest she’ll have been to getting a sense of the place she came from.

They move into the living room and Phin connects his phone to the huge plasma TV screen. He runs a YouTube search and then presses play.

Libby recognises the song immediately. She never knew what it was called or who it was by, but she knows it very well.

The video opens with the band performing in front of the river. They are all dressed similarly in tweed and braces and caps and DM boots. There are many of them, probably about ten members in all. Two of them are women, one of whom plays the fiddle, the other some kind of leathery drum.

‘There,’ says Phin, pausing the video and pointing at the screen. ‘That’s Birdie. Her with the long hair.’

Libby stares at the woman on the screen. A scrawny thing, weak-chinned and serious. She holds her fiddle hard against her chin and stares at the camera imperiously. ‘That’s Birdie?’ she says. She cannot equate this frail, unimpressive-looking woman with the woman in the story Phin told them last night, the sadistic woman who presided over a household of cruelty and abuse.

Phin nods. ‘Yup. Fucking evil bitch.’

He presses play again and the band are now inside a house, a glorious, riotous house filled with oil paintings and overblown furniture, red velvet thrones, gleaming swords and polished panelling, swagged curtains, moose heads, stuffed foxes and glittering chandeliers. The camera follows the band as they skip through the house with their instruments, posing on an ornate carved staircase, charging down wood-panelled corridors, play-fighting with the swords, modelling a knight’s helmet, astride the cannon in the front garden and in front of a huge stone fireplace full of burning logs.

‘Oh my God,’ says Libby. ‘It was so beautiful.’

‘Yes,’ says Phin drily, ‘wasn’t it? And that bitch and my father systematically destroyed it.’

Libby’s gaze returns to the image on the television screen. Ten young people, a house full of life and money and energy and warmth. ‘I don’t understand,’ she says quietly, ‘how it all turned out the way it did.’

42

The early afternoon sun is still hot against their skin as Lucy, the children and the dog walk around the corner to the block of flats behind number sixteen Cheyne Walk. They tiptoe quickly through the communal garden to the rickety door at the back and she gestures to the children to be silent as they pass through the woody area and out on to the lawn which is parched brown by the long hot summer.

She notices with surprise that the back door to the house is unlocked. A pane of glass is broken. The breaks in the glass look fresh. A shiver runs down her spine.

She puts her hand through the broken pane and turns the handle on the inside. The door opens and she breathes a sigh of relief that she won’t have to scale the side of the house to get in through the roof.

‘It’s scary,’ says Stella, following Lucy into the house.

‘Yes,’ agrees Lucy, ‘it is, a bit.’

‘I think it’s awesome,’ says Marco, running his hand across the top of a huge pillared radiator and gazing around the room.

As she shows the children around the house it feels to Lucy as if not one mote of dust or string of cobweb has moved since she was last here. It feels as though it has been in stasis waiting for her to come back. The smell, whilst musty, is also darkly familiar. The way the light slices through the dark rooms, the sound of her feet against the floorboards, the shadows across the walls. It is all exactly the same. She trails her fingertips across surfaces as they step through the house. In the space of a week she has revisited the two most significant houses of her life, Antibes and Chelsea, the two places where she was hurt, where she was broken, from where she was forced to escape. The weight of it all lies heavy in her heart.

After the tour of the house they sit out in the garden. The shadows cast by the overgrown foliage are long and cool.

Lucy watches Marco picking around the garden with a stick. He’s wearing a black T-shirt and for a fleeting moment she sees him as Henry, tending his herb garden. She almost jumps to her feet to check his face. But then she remembers: Henry is a man now. Not a boy.

She tries to picture Henry, but she can’t. She can only see him as she saw him that last night they were all together, the set of his jaw against the shock of what had happened, the candlelight flickering across his cheeks, the dreadful silence of him.

‘What’s this?’ Marco calls to her.

Lucy puts her hand to forehead and peers across the garden.

‘Oh,’ she says, standing and moving towards him. ‘It’s an old herb garden. One of the people who used to live here grew medicine out here.’

He stops then and holds the stick like a staff between his feet and looks up at the back of the house. ‘What happened in there?’ he asks.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, I can just tell. The way you’ve been since we got here. Your hands are shaking. And you always just said your aunt brought you to France because you were an orphan. But I’m starting to think that something really, really bad must have happened to make her bring you. And I think it happened in this house.’

‘We’ll talk about it later,’ she says. ‘It’s a very long story.’

‘Where are your mum and dad?’ he says and she can see now that bringing Marco here has opened up the dams to all the things he never thought to ask her before. ‘Where are they buried?’

She pulls in her breath, smiles tightly. ‘I have no idea. No idea at all.’

Lucy used to write it all down, constantly, when she was younger. She’d buy a lined notepad and a pen and she’d sit somewhere, anywhere, and she’d write it and she’d write it and she’d write it. Streams of consciousness. Phin tied to a pipe in his bedroom, the adults dead, the van waiting in the shadows with its engine rumbling and the long dark drive through the night, the shell-shocked silence, and then the waiting and the waiting for the thing to come and it never did come and now, twenty-four years later, she’s still waiting for it to come and it’s so close she can taste it on the back of her tongue.

This was the story she wrote over and over again. She’d write it and then she’d tear the pages from the notepad, screw them into a ball and toss them in a bin, into the sea, into a dank lightwell. She’d burn them or soak them or tear them into shreds. But she needed to write it down to make it into a story instead of the truth about her life.

And all the time the truth jangled at her nerves, squeezed at her stomach muscles, played drums on her heart, taunted her in her dreams, sickened her when she awoke and stopped her from sleeping when she closed her eyes at night.