I was the one who looked after you, Serenity. I stayed behind and gave you mashed-up bananas and soya milk and porridge and rice. I changed your nappies. I sang you to sleep. We spent many hours together, you and I. It was clear that Lucy and Phin weren’t coming back and the bodies in the kitchen would start to decompose if I stayed much longer. I suspected that someone might have gone to the authorities by now. I knew it was time for me to go. I added a few lines to the suicide note. ‘Our baby is called Serenity Lamb. She is ten months old. Please make sure she goes to nice people.’ I placed the pen I’d written the note with into my mother’s hand, removed it and then left it on the table next to the note. I fed you and put you in a fresh Babygro.

And then, as I was about to leave, I felt in the pocket of my jacket for Justin’s rabbit’s foot. I’d put it in there for luck, not that I believe in such things, and it had clearly brought me no luck at all since I’d taken it from Justin’s room. But I wanted the best for you, Serenity. You were the only truly pure thing in that house, the only good thing to come out of any of it. So I took the rabbit’s foot and I tucked it in with you.

Then I kissed you and said, ‘Goodbye, lovely baby.’

I left through the back of the house, in one of my father’s old Savile Row suits and a pair of his Jermyn Street shoes. I’d tied the bootlace tie around the collar of one of my father’s old shirts and combed my hair into a side fringe. My bag was filled with cash and jewels. I strode out into the morning sun, feeling it golden upon my tired skin. I found a phone box and I dialled 999. In a fake voice I told the police that I was worried about my neighbours. That I hadn’t seen them for a while. That there was a baby crying.

I walked up to the King’s Road; all the shops were still shut. I kept walking until I got to Victoria Station and there I sat outside a scruffy café in my Savile Row suit and I ordered a cup of coffee. I had never had a cup of coffee before. I really wanted a cup of coffee. The coffee came and I tasted it and it was disgusting. I poured two sachets of sugar into it and made myself drink it. I found an anonymous hotel and paid for three nights. Nobody asked my age. When I signed the register I used the name Phineas Thomson. Thomson with an O. Not Thomsen with an E. I wanted to be almost Phin. Not completely Phin.

I watched the TV in my hotel room. There was a small news article at the end of the bulletin. Three bodies. A suicide pact. A cult. A baby found healthy and cared for. Children believed to be missing. Police search under way. The photos they had were our school photos from our last year at primary school. I was only ten and had a short back and sides. Lucy was eight and had a pageboy cut. We were unrecognisable. There was no mention of Phin or of Clemency.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

And so then what? What happened between then, sixteen-year-old me in my underwear on a nylon coverlet in a cheap hotel room watching the news, and middle-aged me now?

Do you want to know? Do you care?

Well, I got a job. I worked in an electrical repair shop in Pimlico. It was owned by a mad Bangladeshi family who couldn’t care less for my back story so long as I turned up to work on time.

I moved into a bedsit. I bought coding books and a computer and studied at home alone at night.

By then there was a proper internet and mobile phones and I left the electrical repair shop and got a job at a Carphone Warehouse on Oxford Street.

I moved into a one-bedroom flat in Marylebone, just before Marylebone became unaffordable. I started to dye my hair blond. I worked out. I built some bulk. I went to clubs at night and had sex with strangers. I fell in love, but he hit me. I fell in love again, but he left me. I got my teeth whitened. I got tropical fish. They died. I got a job at a new internet company. There were five of us at first. Within three years there were fifty of us and I was earning six figures and had my own office.

I bought a three-bedroom flat in Marylebone. I fell in love. He told me I was ugly and that no one would ever love me again and then he left me. I had a nose job. I had eyelash extensions. A tiny bit of filler in my lips.

Then in 2008, I went to the solicitor named on the letterhead of my parents’ original last will and testament. For so long I’d tried to put Cheyne Walk and what happened there to the back of my mind, tried to forge a new life with a new (if slightly borrowed) identity. I wanted nothing to do with pathetic little Henry Lamb or his history. He was dead to me. But as I got older and more settled, I started to think of you, more and more; I wanted to know where you were and who you were and whether or not you were happy.

I knew from the news reports that it had been assumed you were the child of Martina and Henry Lamb. My ‘suicide note’ had been taken at face value and no DNA tests had been run to disprove the assumption. And remembering the terms of my parents’ will it occurred to me that maybe one day you would come back into my life. But I had no idea if the trust was still lodged with the solicitors. And if it was, whether David had done anything to alter its terms during the time he had my mother entirely under his control.

I was in my thirties by now. I was tall, blond, buff and tanned. I introduced myself as Phineas Thomson. I said, ‘I’m looking for some information about a family I used to know. I believe you were their solicitors. The Lambs. Cheyne Walk.’

A young woman shuffled through some papers, clicked some buttons on her keyboard, told me that they managed a trust for the family but that she was not at liberty to tell me any more.

There was a cute boy there. I’d caught his eye when I sat in reception. I waited outside the office until lunchtime and then I caught up with him as he left the office. His name was Josh. Of course. Everyone’s name is Josh these days.

I took him back to my flat and cooked for him and fucked him and, of course, because I was only using him, he fell totally in love with me. It took less than a month of pretending I loved him too, to get him to find the paperwork, copy it and bring it to me.

And then there it was, in black and white, just as my parents had decreed when I was a tiny baby and Lucy was not yet even in existence. Number sixteen Cheyne Walk and all its contents to be held in trust for the descendants of Martina and Henry Lamb until the oldest reaches the age of twenty-five. David had not managed to get his hands on it after all and neither, it seemed, had Lucy reappeared to make a claim. The trust was still sitting there, ready and waiting, waiting for you to turn twenty-five. Someone more cynical than you might think I came to find you simply as a way to get my hands on my own inheritance. After all, I had no proof I was Henry Lamb so there was no way I’d be able to claim it for myself, and with you in my life I’d stand a chance to get what was rightfully mine. But you know, it really wasn’t about the money. I have plenty of money. It was about closure. And it was about you, Serenity, and the bond I shared with you.

So, in June this year I rented the Airbnb across the river. I bought a pair of binoculars and I kept watch from the terrace.

One morning I scaled the back of the house on Cheyne Walk and spent a whole day on the roof dismantling Birdie’s skeleton from its mummified casing. Pulling apart her tiny little bones. Dropping them into a black plastic bag. By the dark of night, I dropped the bag into the Thames. It was surprisingly small. I spent the night on my old mattress and returned to the Airbnb the following morning. And then, four days later, there you were. You and the solicitor. Heaving back the hoarding. Opening the door. Closing it behind you again.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

Finally.

The baby was back.

65

Libby stares at Lucy. ‘What happened to Phin? After you left him at Dr Broughton’s? Did he, I mean, did he get better?’

‘Yes,’ says Lucy. ‘He got better.’

‘Is he still alive?’

‘As far as I’m aware. Yes.’

Libby covers her mouth with her hands. ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since I was about eighteen. We were in France together for a few years. And then we lost touch.’

‘How did you both end up in France?’ asks Libby.