She knows exactly where he means. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Our café. I can be there in an hour.’

Dido looks at her after she hangs up and says, ‘You know, I think this might be a good juncture for you to take some annual leave.’

Libby grimaces. ‘But—’

‘But nothing. I’ll take on the Morgans and Cerian Tahany. We’ll say you’re ill. Whatever the hell is going on here is more important than kitchens.’

Libby half opens her mouth to say something in support of the importance of kitchens. Kitchens are important. Kitchens make people happy. People need kitchens. Kitchens, and the people who buy them, have been her life for the last five years. But she knows that Dido’s right.

She nods instead and says, ‘Thank you, Dido.’

Then she tidies her desk, replies to two new emails in her inbox, sets her account to Out-of-Office autoreply and heads away from St Albans High Street to the train station.

45

CHELSEA, 1992

By May 1992 our household had curdled and transmogrified into something monstrous. The outside world, filled as it was with meat-eaters and fumes and germs that could not be fought off by sweaty exercise and pretty flowers alone, was sure to bring about the death of David’s precious spawn. So nobody was allowed to go outside. We had vegetables delivered to our door weekly and our larder was filled with enough pulses, grains and beans to feed us for at least five years.

Then one day, shortly before my fifteenth birthday, David ordered us to surrender our shoes.

Our shoes.

Shoes, apparently, even shoes that were not made of dead animals, were bad, bad, bad. They were suggestive of dirty pavements and joyless trudges to evil offices where people made yet more money to lavish upon the already rich whilst leaving the poor in the shackles of government-manufactured deprivation. Poor people in India did not, apparently, wear shoes; therefore, neither should we. All of our shoes were collected together into a cardboard box and left outside the nearest charity shop.

From the day that David took our shoes until the night of our escape two years later, nobody set foot outside our house.

46

Miller is eating when Libby walks into the café on West End Lane.

‘What’s that?’ she asks, hanging her handbag on the back of the chair and sitting down.

‘Chicken and chorizo wrap,’ he replies, wiping some sauce from the corner of his mouth. ‘So good. So, so good.’

‘It’s four o’clock,’ she says. ‘What meal does this constitute?’

He ponders the question. ‘Late lunch? Or early supper? Dunch? Linner? Have you eaten?’

She shakes her head. She’s not eaten since breakfast on Phin’s terrace this morning and neither has she wanted to. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she says.

He shrugs and bites into his wrap again.

Libby orders a pot of tea and waits for Miller to finish eating.

There is something strangely attractive about Miller’s appetite. He eats as though there is nothing else he would rather be doing. He eats, she observes, mindfully.

‘So,’ says Miller, opening up his laptop, typing something into it and then turning it to face Libby. ‘Meet Birdie Dunlop-Evers. Or Bridget Elspeth Veronica Dunlop-Evers, to give her her full name. Born in Gloucestershire in April 1964. Moved to London in 1982 and studied violin at the Royal College of Music. Used to busk at the weekends and then joined a band called Green Sunday with her then boyfriend, Roger Milton. Roger Milton, incidentally, went on to be the lead singer in the Crows.’

He looks at her expectantly.

She stares back blankly. ‘Are they famous?’

He rolls his eyes. ‘Never mind,’ he continues. ‘Anyway, she jobs about with her fiddle for a few years before auditioning for a band called the Original Version. She starts a relationship with a man called Justin Redding and brings him into the band as a percussionist. According to interviews from the time, she was quite controlling. Nobody liked her. They had their big number one in the summer of 1988 and then released one more single with her and Justin, but when that tanked, she blamed everybody else, had a hissy fit and left, taking Justin with her. And that is the end of Birdie Dunlop-Evers’s internet life story. Nothing since. Just …’ He uses his hand to describe something falling off a cliff.

‘But what about her parents?’

‘Nothing. She was one of eight children, from a big posh Catholic family. Her parents are still alive, as far as I can tell – at least, I’ve found nothing to suggest that they’re not – and there are dozens of posh little Dunlop-Everses out there playing musical instruments and running vegan home-delivery services. But for whatever reason, her family didn’t notice or maybe just didn’t care that their fourth daughter disappeared off the face of the earth in 1994.’

‘And what about her boyfriend? Justin?’

‘Nothing. A couple of mentions of him during his brief phase as a percussionist on the two Original Version hit singles. But nothing else.’

Libby pauses to absorb this. How can it be possible for people to slip off the edge of existence like that? How can it be possible for no one to notice?

He turns the screen back to himself and types something in. ‘So,’ he says, ‘then I started looking into Phin. I got in touch with the Airbnb owner and said I was investigating a murder case and needed the name of the last person to rent his apartment. He was very forthcoming, clearly wanted in on the excitement. Justin Redding.’

Libby looks at him, startled. ‘What?’

‘Phin, or whoever that guy was, used the name of Birdie’s ex-boyfriend to check into an Airbnb.’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Wow.’

‘Yeah, right?’ He types something else into his laptop. ‘And last, but by no means least, I give you Sally Radlett.’

He turns the screen towards her again. There is an older woman, silver hair cut into a helmet, horn-rimmed glasses, watery blue eyes, a suggestion of a smile, a light blue blouse unbuttoned to the third button, a pale collarbone, echoes of beauty in the angles of her face. Underneath her photograph are the words ‘Life Therapist and Coach. Penreath, Cornwall’.

‘Right town. Right age. Looks like the right career area generally – you know, life therapist. Kind of bullshit thing you’d end up doing, isn’t it? If you were in fact Sally Thomsen?’

He looks at her triumphantly. ‘What do you think?’ he says. ‘It’s her, isn’t it?’

She shrugs. ‘Well, yeah, I guess it could be.’

‘And there’s her address.’ He points at the screen and she can see the question in his eyes.

‘You think we should go?’

‘I think we should, yes.’

‘When?’

He raises an eyebrow, smiles and presses a number into his phone. He clears his throat and says, ‘Hello, is that Sally Radlett?’

She can hear a voice down the line saying yes.

Then, as suddenly as he’d made the call, Miller ends it. He looks at Libby and says, ‘Now?’

‘But—’ She’s about to start foraging for a reason why she cannot possibly go now, but remembers that she has no reason. ‘I need a shower,’ she manages.

He smiles, turns the laptop back to face him again and starts to type. ‘B and B?’ he says. ‘Or Premier Inn?’

‘Premier Inn.’

‘Excellent.’ With a few more clicks he’s booked them two rooms at a Premier Inn in Truro. ‘You can shower when we get there.’ He closes his screen and unplugs his laptop, slides it into a nylon case. ‘Ready?’

She gets to her feet feeling strangely excited at the prospect of spending the rest of the day with him.

‘Ready.’

47

I decided that the oncoming baby was the cause of all our ills. I saw my mother getting fatter, the rest of us getting thinner. And I saw David fluffing out his tail feathers, preening and strutting. Every pound my mother gained, every time the baby kicked or wriggled, David developed another layer of sickening self-belief. I tried to keep hold of what Phin had told me the day we went to Kensington Market, about David being thrown out of the last home he tried to infiltrate and take control of. I tried to imagine the humiliation for him of being caught red-handed stealing from his hosts. I tried to remind myself that the man who’d turned up homeless and penniless on our doorstep four years earlier, was the same man swaggering now about my house like a puffed-up turkey.

I could not bear the thought of that baby coming into existence. I knew that David would use it to cement his role as the god of our warped little universe. If the baby didn’t come, my mother could stop eating all the time, and we’d be able to bring germs into the house again. And, more importantly, there’d be absolutely no reason whatsoever for us to have anything more to do with David Thomsen. There’d be nothing to connect us, nothing to link us.