The Turn of the Key - Ruth Ware Page 0,53

least, it did give the impression that the door was locked, and I knew I would sleep more soundly because of it.

When I went back into the kitchen to clear away the pizza box and our plates, the clock above the stove read 11:36, and I could not suppress a groan. The girls would be up at six. I should have been in bed hours ago.

Well, it was too late to undo that. I’d just have to forgo a shower and get to sleep as quickly as possible. I was so tired, I was pretty sure that wouldn’t be a problem, anyway.

“Lights off,” I said aloud.

The room was instantly plunged into blackness, just the faint glow from the hallway illuminating the concrete floor. Smothering a yawn, I made my way up the stairs to bed, and was asleep almost before I had undressed.

When I woke, it was with a start, to complete darkness, and a sense of total disorientation. Where was I? What had woken me?

It took a minute for the memory to come back—Heatherbrae House. The Elincourts. The children. Jack.

My phone on the bedside table said it was 3:16 a.m., and I groaned and let it fall back to the wood with a clunk. No wonder it was still dark, it was the middle of the fucking night.

Stupid brain.

But what the hell had woken me? Was it Petra? Had one of the girls cried out in their sleep?

I lay for a moment, listening. I could hear nothing, but I was a floor away, and there were two closed doors between me and the children.

At last, suppressing a sigh, I got up, wrapped my dressing gown around myself, and went out onto the landing.

The house was quiet. But something felt . . . wrong, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. The rain had stopped, and I could hear nothing at all, not even the far-off roar of a car, or the whisper of wind in the trees.

When the realization came, it was in the shape of two things. The first was the shadow on the wall in front of me, the shadow cast by the wilting peonies on the table downstairs.

Someone had turned the hall lights on downstairs. Lights that I was sure I had not left on when I went to bed.

The second came as I began to tiptoe down the stairs, and it made my heart almost stop and then begin beating hard enough to leap out of my chest.

It was the sound of footsteps on a wooden floor, slow and deliberate, exactly like the other night.

Creak. Creak. Creak.

My chest felt like it was constricted by an iron band. I froze, two steps down, looking at the light on the landing below, and then up at where the noise seemed to be coming from. Jesus Christ. Was someone in the house?

The light I could have understood. Perhaps Maddie or Ellie had got up to use the loo and left it on—there were dim little night-lights plugged into the wall at intervals, but they would probably have switched on the main hallway light anyway.

But the footsteps . . . ?

I thought of Sandra’s voice, suddenly coming without warning over the sound system in the kitchen. Could that be the answer? The bloody Happy app? But how? More important, why? It didn’t make sense. The only people with access to the app were Sandra and Bill, and they had no possible motivation to scare me like this. Quite the reverse, in fact. They had just gone to enormous trouble and expense to recruit me.

Besides, it just didn’t sound like it was coming from the speakers. There was no sense of a disembodied noise, the way there had been with Sandra’s voice in the kitchen. There, I’d had no impression of someone standing behind me, talking to me. It had sounded exactly like what it was—someone being broadcast through speakers. This, though, was different. I could hear the footsteps start on one side of the ceiling and move slowly and implacably to the other. Then they paused, and reversed. It sounded . . . well . . . as if there was someone pacing in the room above my head. But that made no sense either. Because there was no room up there. There was not so much as a loft hatch.

An image suddenly flashed into my head—something I hadn’t thought of since the day I arrived. The locked door in my room. Where did it lead to? Was

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