‘Yes,’ she interjects, ‘me too. I think he drugged us. But why?’
‘That,’ says Miller, ‘I do not know. But you should check your phone. Do you have a passcode?’
‘Yes,’ she replies.
‘What is it?’
She sighs. Her shoulders slump. ‘It’s my birth date.’
‘Right,’ says Miller. ‘Well, check your phone for anything weird. He might have left something on it. Spyware or something.’
‘Spyware?’
‘God, hell knows. He’s odd. Everything about last night was odd. He broke into your house. He drugged us—’
‘Might have drugged us.’
‘Might have drugged us. At the very least he snuck into our room while we slept, used my fingerprint to access my phone, took your phone from your bag and then locked us in. I wouldn’t put anything past this guy.’
‘No,’ she says softly. ‘No, you’re right. I will. I’ll check it. I mean, he might even be listening to us now.’
‘Yes. He might. And, buddy, if you’re listening, we’re on to you, you creepy fuck.’ She hears him draw in his breath. ‘We should meet up again. Soon. I’ve been researching Birdie Dunlop-Evers. She’s got an interesting back story. And I think I might have found out more about the other guy who lived here: Justin, Birdie’s boyfriend. When are you free?’
Libby’s pulse quickens at the prospect of developments in the story. ‘Tonight,’ she says breathlessly. ‘I mean, even …’ She looks up at Dido who is staring intently at her. ‘Now?’ She aims the question at Dido who nods at her furiously and mouths go, go.
‘I can meet you now. Anywhere.’
‘Our café?’ he says.
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