me. If I don’t answer’ – she looks quickly behind her where she can see Phin still behind the kitchen counter, slicing bread – ‘I’m in Battersea in an apartment block directly opposite the house. OK? I don’t know what number it is. But I’m about the tenth floor up. I’ll see you soon. I’m sorry. And bye.’
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.