‘Yes. We do. But we also need to remember that we’ve killed people and that we could go to prison.’

‘But it was an accident,’ she said. ‘None of us meant to kill anyone. The police would know that.’

‘No. They wouldn’t. We have no evidence of any abuse. Of anything that happened here. We only have our version of events.’

But then I stopped. I looked at Lucy and I looked at you and I thought: There it is. There’s the proof we need, if we did decide to ask for help, the evidence of the abuse is there. Right there.

I said, ‘Lucy. The baby. The baby is proof that you were abused. You’re fifteen. You were fourteen when the baby was born. They can do a DNA test. Prove that David was her father. You can say he raped you, over and over again, from when you were a young child. You can say that Birdie encouraged him. And then they stole your baby. I mean it’s virtually true anyway. And then I can say … I can say I found the grown-ups like that. I could leave a faked note, saying that they were so ashamed of what they’d done. Of how they’d treated us.’

I was suddenly overcome with the feeling that we could get out of this. We could get out of here and not go to jail and Phin could get better and Lucy could keep her baby and everyone would be nice to us.

And then Lucy said, ‘Henry. You know Serenity isn’t David’s, don’t you?’

My God, what a gullible idiot, I still didn’t see it. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, well, then whose could it possibly be?’

And then it fell into place. I laughed at first. And then I wanted to be sick. And then I said, ‘Really? You? And Phin? Really?’

Lucy nodded.

‘But how?’ I asked. ‘When? I don’t understand.’

She dropped her head and said, ‘In his room. Only twice. It was like, I don’t know, a comfort thing. I went to him because I was worried about him. Because he seemed so ill. And then we just found ourselves …’

‘Oh my God. You whore!’

She tried to placate me, but I pushed her away. I said, ‘Get away from me. You’re disgusting. You are sick and you are disgusting. You are a slut. A dirty, dirty slut.’

Yes, I laid it on with a trowel. I have rarely been as disgusted by another human being as I was by Lucy that day.

I couldn’t look at her. I couldn’t think straight. Every time I tried to think about something, tried to decide what to do next, my mind would fill with images of Lucy and Phin: him on top of her, him kissing her, his hands, the hands that I had held that day on the roof, all over my sister’s body. I had never felt a rage like it, never felt such hatred and hurt and pain.

I wanted to kill someone. And this time I wanted to do it on purpose.

I went to Phin’s room. Lucy tried to stop me. I pushed her away from me.

‘Is it true?’ I screamed at him. ‘Is it true that you had sex with Lucy?’

He looked at me blankly.

‘Is it?’ I screamed again. ‘Tell me!’

‘I’m not telling you anything,’ he said, ‘until you untie me.’

He sounded exhausted. He sounded as if he was fading away.

I immediately felt my rage start to dissipate and went and sat down at the foot of his bed.

I dropped my head into my hands. When I looked up his eyes were closed.

There was a moment of silence.

‘Are you dying, Phin?’ I asked.

‘I don’t. Fucking. Know.’

‘We need to get out of here,’ I said. ‘You have to get it together. Seriously.’

‘I can’t.’

‘But you have to.’

‘Fucking just leave me here. I want to die.’

It did occur to me, I have to confess, that I could put a pillow over his face and push down, hold my face next to his to draw in his dying breath, whisper soothing words into his ear, overpower him, snuff his life force, take his power for myself. But, remember, apart from my mother’s unborn baby – and I have googled this extensively over the intervening years and really, it would be very hard to abort a healthy pregnancy using parsley – I never killed anyone deliberately. I am a dark person, Serenity, I know that. I don’t feel the way that other people feel. But I am capable of great compassion and great love.

And I loved Phin more than I have ever loved any other person since.

I untie his wrist from the radiator, and I lay down next to him.

I said, ‘Did you ever like me? Even for a minute?’

He said, ‘I always liked you. Why wouldn’t I like you?’

I paused to consider the question. ‘Because of me liking you? Too much?’

‘Annoying,’ he said, and there was a note of wry humour in his fading voice. ‘Very annoying.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can see that. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for letting your dad think you’d pushed me in the Thames. I’m sorry for trying to kiss you. I’m sorry for being annoying.’

The house creaked and groaned around us. You were asleep. Lucy had set you down in the old cot in my parents’ dressing room. I had been awake for thirty-six hours by this point and the silence, the sound of Phin’s breathing, lulled me into an immediate and rapturous sleep.

When I awoke, two hours later, Lucy and Phin had gone, and you were still asleep in your cot.

63

Libby looks at Lucy, this woman surrounded by loving children whom she has brought all the way from France to England. She has even brought her dog. She clearly is not the sort of woman to leave behind people she loves. She says, ‘Why did you leave me?’

Lucy immediately starts to shake her head.

‘No,’ she says, ‘no. No. I didn’t leave you. I never left you. But Phin was so ill and you were so healthy and well. So I put you down in your cot, waited until you fell asleep, and I went back to Phin’s room. Henry was asleep and I managed to persuade Phin to stand up, finally. He was so heavy; I was so weak. I got him out of the house and we went to my father’s doctor’s house. Dr Broughton. I remembered being taken there when I was small, just around the corner. He had a bright red front door. I remembered. It was about midnight. He came to the door in a dressing gown. I told him who I was. Then I said’ – she laughs wryly at a memory – ‘I said, “I’ve got money! I can pay you!”

‘At first he looked angry. Then he looked at Phin, looked at him properly and said, “Oh my, oh my, oh my.” He went upstairs quickly, grumbling under his breath; then he came back down fully dressed in a shirt and trousers.

‘He took us into his surgery. All the lights were off. He turned them on, two rows of strip lights, all coming on at once. I had to shield my eyes. And he laid Phin on a bed and he checked all of his vitals and he asked me what the hell was going on. He said, “Where are your parents?” I had no idea what to say.

‘I said, “They’re gone.” And he looked at me sideways. As if to say, We’ll get to that later. Then he called someone. I heard him explaining the situation to them, lots of medical jargon. Half an hour later a young man appeared. He was Dr Broughton’s nurse. Between them they did about a dozen tests. The nurse went off into the middle of the night with a bag of things to take to a lab. I hadn’t slept for two days. I was seeing stars. Dr Broughton made me a cup of hot chocolate. It was … crazy as it sounds, it was the best hot chocolate of my life. And I sat on the sofa in his consulting rooms and I fell asleep.

‘When I woke up it was about five in the morning and the nurse was back from the lab. Phin was on a drip. But his eyes were open. Dr Broughton told me that Phin was suffering from severe malnutrition. He said that with plenty of fluids and some time to recover, he’d be fine.

‘I just nodded and said, “His father’s dead. I don’t know where his mother lives. We have a baby. I don’t know what to do.”

‘When I told him that we had a baby, his face fell. He said, “Good Lord. How old are you exactly?”

‘I said, “I’m fifteen.”

‘He gave me a strange look and said, “Where is this baby?”

‘I said, “She’s at the house. With my brother.”

‘“And your parents? Where have they gone?”

‘I said. “They’re dead.”

‘He sighed then. He said, “I had no idea. I’m very sorry.” And then he said, “Look. I don’t know what’s going on here and I don’t want to get involved in any of this. But you have brought this boy to my door and I have a duty of care towards him. So, let’s keep him here for a while. I have the room for him.”

‘And then I said I wanted to leave, to go back for you, but he said, “You look anaemic. I want to run some tests on you before I let you back out there. Give you something to eat.”

‘So he fed me, a bowl of cereal and a banana. He took some blood, checked my blood pressure, my teeth, my ears, like a horse at market.

‘He told me I was dehydrated and that I needed to spend some time under observation and on fluids’

Then Lucy looks up at Libby and says. ‘I’m so sorry, so, so sorry. But by the time he said I was OK to leave the house, it was all over. The police had been, social services had been, you were gone.’

Her eyes fill with tears.

‘I was too late.’

64

CHELSEA, 1994