‘Ah, but you’re still young.’

‘Yes,’ she’d agreed, forgetting for once her usual sense of running out of time to achieve all her arbitrary goals. ‘I am.’

She redresses in yesterday’s clothes and gets to the lobby at two minutes past nine where Miller is already waiting for her. He has not changed or, it seems, showered. He looks dishevelled, every bit like a man who has not seen his own bed for forty-eight hours. But there is something pleasing to behold about his shagginess and his carewornness and she has to resist the temptation to arrange his hair for him, to straighten the neck of his T-shirt.

He has, of course, partaken of a hearty Premier Inn breakfast and is just downing the dregs of a coffee when she appears. Now he smiles at her, puts down his cup and together they leave the hotel.

Sally’s practice is on the high street of Penreath in a small stone building. The shopfront houses a spa called the Beach. Sally’s rooms are up a flight of stairs on the first floor. Miller rings the bell and a very young girl answers.

‘Yes?’

‘Hello,’ says Miller. ‘We’re looking for Sally Radlett.’

‘I’m afraid she’s with a client at the moment. Can I help?’

The girl is pale and naturally blonde and shares the same well-formed bone structure as Sally. For a moment Libby thinks that this must be Sally’s daughter. But that can’t be right. Sally must be at least sixty, probably older.

‘Erm, no, we really do need to speak to Sally,’ says Miller.

‘Do you have an appointment?’

‘No,’ he says, ‘sadly not. It’s something of an emergency.’

The girl narrows her eyes slightly and then turns her gaze to a leather Chesterfield sofa and says, ‘Would you like to take a seat, while you’re waiting? She won’t be much longer.’

‘Thank you so much,’ says Miller and they sit side by side.

It’s a tiny room; they are close enough to the girl, who is back behind her desk, to hear her breathing.

A phone call breaks the awkward silence and Libby turns to Miller and whispers, ‘What if it’s not her?’

‘Then it’s not her,’ he says, shrugging.

Libby gazes at him for a split second. She realises that he doesn’t see life the way she sees it. He’s prepared to be wrong; he doesn’t always need to know what’s going to happen next. The thought of living life as Miller lives his life is strangely appealing to her.

A tall woman appears. She is wearing a grey short-sleeved dress and gold sandals. She says goodbye to a middle-aged man and then catches their eyes, giving them an uncertain look. She turns to the girl behind the desk and says, ‘Lola?’

The girl looks at them and says, ‘They asked for an emergency appointment.’

She turns back to them and smiles uncertainly. ‘Hello?’

It is clear that she does not like people walking in asking for emergency appointments.

But Miller is unfazed and gets to his feet. ‘Sally,’ he says. ‘My name is Miller Roe. This is my friend Libby Jones. I wonder if you might be able to spare us ten minutes or so?’

She glances back at the girl called Lola. Lola confirms that Sally’s next appointment is not until eleven thirty. She beckons them into her office and then closes the door behind them.

Sally’s consulting room is cosy in a Scandinavian style: a pale sofa with a crocheted blanket thrown across it, pale grey walls, a white-painted desk and chairs. The walls are hung with dozens of framed black and white photographs.

‘So,’ she says. ‘What can I do for you?’

Miller glances at Libby. He wants her to start. She turns back to Sally and she says, ‘I just inherited a house. A big house. In Chelsea.’

‘Chelsea?’ she repeats vaguely.

‘Yes. Cheyne Walk.’

‘Mm-hm.’ She nods, just once.

‘Number sixteen.’

‘Yes, yes,’ she says with a note of impatience. ‘I don’t—’ she begins. But then she stops and narrows her eyes slightly.

‘Oh!’ she says. ‘You’re the baby!’

Libby nods. ‘Are you Sally Thomsen?’ she asks.

Sally pauses. ‘Well,’ she says after a moment, ‘technically, no. I reverted to my maiden name a few years ago, when I started this practice. I didn’t want anyone to … well. I was in a bad place for quite some time and I wanted a fresh start, I suppose. But yes. I was Sally Thomsen. Now listen,’ she says, her tone suddenly becoming clipped and officious. ‘I don’t want to get involved in anything, you know. My daughter, she made me swear never to discuss anything about the house in Chelsea. Never to talk about it. She suffered from years of PTSD after what happened there, and really, she’s still very damaged. It’s not my place to say anything. And as much as I’m glad to see you here, alive and well, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you both to leave.’

‘Could we, maybe, speak to your daughter? Do you think?’

Sally throws a steely gaze at Miller, the asker of this question. ‘Absolutely not,’ she says. ‘Absolutely not.’

50

CHELSEA, 1992

My mother never really recovered from losing the baby.

She slowly withdrew from community life. She also withdrew from David. She began to spend more time with my father, just the two of them sitting quietly side by side.

I of course felt completely responsible for my mother’s unhappiness. I attempted to remedy the situation by feeding her concoctions from Justin’s books that claimed to cure people of melancholia. But it was virtually impossible to get her to eat anything, so nothing I did made any difference.

David seemed to have abandoned her. I was surprised. I would have expected him to want to be involved in her rehabilitation. But he was distant with her, virtually cold.

One day, shortly after my mother lost the baby, I asked David, ‘Why aren’t you talking to my mother any more?’

He looked at me and sighed. ‘Your mother is healing. She needs to follow her own path towards that.’

Her own path.

I felt a wave of fury begin to build inside me. ‘I don’t think she is healing,’ I responded. ‘I think she’s getting worse. And what about my father? Shouldn’t he be getting some kind of care? Some kind of treatment? All he does is sit in that chair all day. Maybe in the outside world someone could do something for him. Maybe some kind of therapy. Maybe even electric shock therapy or something like that. There might be all sorts of medical advances being made for stroke victims that we don’t even know about because we’re all just stuck in here …’ I’d begun to shout and as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I’d passed into a bad place and then there it was, the cold, sharp skin of his hand, hard against the side of my jaw.

I tasted the metallic sting of blood inside my mouth, felt a numbness building up around my lips. I touched the blood with a fingertip and looked at David in horror.

He stared down at me, his big shoulders hunched up around his ears, a vein throbbing on the side of his head. It was incredible how quickly this quiet, spiritual man could turn into a raging monster. ‘You have no right to talk about these things,’ he growled. ‘You know nothing about anything. You are an infant.’

‘But he’s my father. And ever since you came you’ve just treated him like shit!’

His hand came back, this time across the other side of my face. I had always known this was going to happen. I had known from the moment I first saw him that David Thomsen would strike me if I confronted him. And here it was.

‘You ruined everything,’ I said in a nothing-to-lose-now rush of emotion. ‘You think you’re so powerful and so important but you’re not! You’re just a bully! You came into my home and you bullied everyone into being what you wanted us to be. And then you made my mum pregnant and now she’s sad and you don’t care, you don’t care at all. Because all you care about is yourself!’

This time he hit me hard enough to throw me across the floor.

‘Get up!’ he yelled. ‘Get up, and go to your room. You are in isolation for a week.’

‘You’re going to lock me up?’ I said. ‘For talking to you? For telling you how I feel?’

‘No,’ he snarled. ‘I am locking you up because I cannot bear to look at you. Because you disgust me. Now, you can either walk or I can drag you. What’s it to be?’

I got to my feet and I ran. But I didn’t run to the stairs, I ran to the front door. I turned the handle and I pulled and I was ready, ready to fly, ready to flag down a stranger and say, God help us, we’re trapped in a house with a megalomaniac. God help us please! But the door was locked.

How had I not known this? I tugged and tugged and then turned to him and said, ‘You’ve locked us in!’

‘No,’ he said. ‘The door is locked. That is not the same thing at all. Now, shall we?’

I stamped up the back stairs to the attic floor, David following behind.

I heard the sound of the lock on my bedroom door turning.

I wailed and I cried like a terrible pathetic overgrown baby.

I heard Phin shouting at me through his bedroom wall: ‘Shut up! Just shut up!’

I screamed for my mother but she didn’t come.