reached the ground, she’d stood clutching the rung in front of her with both hands, resting her forehead against the tree’s rough trunk, safe in the still quiet of the moment, unsure where to go or what to do next. Absurdly, the thought had come that she should head for the stream, catch up with her sisters and baby brother, her father with his clarinet and his bemused smile …
Perhaps that was when she noticed she could no longer hear them.
She’d headed for the house instead, eyes averted, bare feet picking along the hot stone path. There was an instant when her glance skittered sideways and she thought she noticed something large and white by the garden bed, something that shouldn’t be there, but she bowed her head and glimpsed away and went faster, fuelled by the wildly childish hope that maybe if she didn’t look and didn’t see, she could reach the house, jump across the threshold, and everything would continue on as normal.
She was in shock, of course, but it hadn’t felt that way. She’d been buffered by a preternatural calm, was wearing a cloak, a magic cloak that let her slip outside real life, like the person in a fairy tale who exists off the page and arrives to find the castle sleeping. She’d stopped to pick up the hoop from the ground, before she continued inside.
The house was eerily quiet. The sun had slipped behind the roof and the entrance hall was dark. She waited by the open doorway for her eyes to adjust. There was a sputtering sound as the iron drainpipes cooled, a noise that signified summer and holidays and long warm twilights with moths fluttering around the lamps.
She looked up the carpeted staircase and knew somehow that her sisters weren’t there. The hall clock ticked away the seconds and she wondered, briefly, whether they were all gone—Ma, Daddy and the baby too—and she’d been left alone with whatever it was beneath that white sheet out there. The thought sent a tremor down her spine. And then a thump came from the sitting room, and she turned her head, and there was her father standing by the unlit fireplace. He was curiously rigid, one hand by his side, the other balled in a fist upon the wooden mantel as he said, ‘For God’s sake, my wife is lucky to be alive.’
A man’s voice came from off-stage, somewhere beyond the doorway where Laurel couldn’t see him: ‘I appreciate that, Mr. Nicolson, just as I hope you’ll appreciate that we’re only doing our job.’
Laurel tiptoed closer, stopping before she reached the spilled light creeping through the open doorway. Her mother was in the armchair, cradling the baby in her arms. He was asleep; Laurel could see his cherubic profile, his plump cheek squashed up flat against her mother’s shoulder.
There were two other men in the room, a balding fellow on the sofa and a young man by the window taking notes. Police-men, she realised. Of course they were policemen. Something terrible had happened. The white sheet in the sunny garden.
The older man said, ‘Did you recognise him, Mrs Nicolson? Is he someone you’ve met before? Someone you’ve seen, even from a distance?’
Laurel’s mother didn’t answer, at least not so anyone could hear. She was whispering against the back of the baby’s head, her lips moving softly against his fine hair. Daddy spoke loudly on her behalf. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘As she told you before, she’d never laid eyes on him. If you ask me, you ought to be comparing his description to that fellow in the papers, the one who’s been bothering picnickers.’
‘We’ll be following all leads, Mr Nicolson, you can be sure of that. But right now there’s a dead body in your garden and only your wife’s word as to how it got there.’
Daddy bristled. ‘That man attacked my wife. It was self-defence.’ ‘Did you see it happen, Mr Nicolson?’
There was a note of impatience in the older policeman’s voice and it made Laurel frightened. She took a step back-wards. They didn’t know she was there. There was no need for them to find out. She could creep away, keep on up the stairs, mind not to hit the creaky floorboard, curl up tightly on her bed. She could leave them to the mysterious machinations of the adult world and let them find her when they’d finished; let them tell her everything was fixed—