just—I didn’t sleep well last night.”
Ugh. I had already told him that. He was going to think I was coming apart, adding amnesia to my list of frailties. I was better than this. Stronger than this. I had to be.
I badly wanted a cigarette, but the CV I had handed in to Sandra had said “nonsmoker” and I couldn’t risk unpicking that particular thread. I might discover everything unraveled.
I found myself glancing up, towards the ever-watching egg-shaped eye in the corner of the room.
“Jack, what are we going to tell Sandra?” I asked, and then the baby monitor crackled into life again, this time a more determined cry that I could hear both through the speaker, and coming down the stairs. “Hold that thought,” I said, and sprinted hastily for the stairs.
* * *
Ten minutes later I was back down with a freshly changed Petra, who was grumpy and blinking, and looking as tousled and confused as I felt. She glowered at Jack as I came back into the kitchen, her little hands gripping my top like a small marsupial, but when he chucked her under the chin she gave a little, reluctant smile, and then a proper one as he pulled a funny expression, laughing and then twisting her face away in that funny way children do when they know they’re being charmed into good spirits in spite of themselves.
She let herself be settled in her high chair with some segments of satsuma, and then I turned back to Jack.
“I was just saying—Sandra and Bill. We have to tell them about the attic—right? Or do you think they know?”
“I’m not sure,” Jack said thoughtfully. He rubbed his chin, his fingers rasping over dark auburn stubble. “They’re sort of perfectionists, the way that cupboard was boarded up inside didn’t look like their work. And I can’t imagine they’d leave all that crap up there. Sorry, excuse my French, Petra,” he said formally, giving her a little mock bow. “All that rubbish, is what I meant to say. They cleared the house when they moved in from what I understand—I didn’t start work until a couple of years after they bought it, so I didn’t see the renovations, but Bill’ll bore the hind leg off a donkey if you give him an excuse to talk about the work. I can’t imagine them just ignoring something like that. No, my best bet is that they’d never opened the cupboard and didn’t know the attic was there. The key was pretty stiff, you’d be forgiven for thinking you had the wrong one. It’s only because I’m a stubborn bastard I forced it.”
“But . . . the poison garden,” I said slowly. “They did just ignore that, right?”
“The poison garden?” He looked at me, startled. “How do you know about that?”
“The girls took me in,” I said shortly. “I didn’t know what it was at the time. But my point is they’ve done the same thing there, haven’t they? Shut the door, forgotten about it?”
“Well,” Jack said slowly, “I . . . well, I think that’s a bit different. They’ve never been as hands-on in the grounds. There’s nothing up there to harm anyone, though.”
“What about the writing?”
“Aye, that’s a bit weird, I’ll give you that.” He took a long gulp of tea and frowned. “It looked like a child, didn’t you think? But according to Jean, there’d been no kids in the house for more than forty years, when the Elincourts moved in.”
“It did look like a child.” My thoughts flickered to Maddie, then Elspeth, and then to the heavy manlike tread I’d heard, night after night. That had not been the step of a child. “Or . . . like someone pretending to be a child,” I added slowly, and he nodded.
“Could be vandals, I suppose, trying to creep people out. It’s true the house was empty for a long time. But then . . . no, that doesn’t make sense. Vandals would hardly have boarded up behind themselves. It must have been the previous owners who did that.”
“Dr. Grant . . .” I paused, trying to think how to phrase the question that had been hovering at the edge of my mind ever since I had read the newspaper article. “Did you . . . I mean, are you . . . ?”
“Related?” Jack said. He gave a laugh, and shook his head. “God, no. Grants are ten a penny up here. I mean, I suppose we’d have all been part