I Spy Read online

  Zac guided me to the Cross of Sacrifice, and I knelt to place the small cross at its base, among the others, before I rose and stepped backwards.

  ‘What was his rank?’ Zac asked.

  ‘Squadron Leader. He was a commissioned officer, but he wasn’t born into it. He grew up on my grandparents’ dairy farm. He was young when he died. Thirty-three. They both were. Did I tell you he flew search and rescue helicopters?’

  ‘You did. You should be very proud.’

  As I honoured my military father and civilian mother, I thought of my grandmother, and what she constantly said about my parents’ deaths. She, of course, had a conspiracy theory, and believed that the car accident that killed them wasn’t an accident at all but made to look like one because my father knew something he shouldn’t. Whenever she dropped her dark hints I tried to quiz her, only for her to clam up. Sometimes, I thought my obsession with joining the Security Service was driven by my wish to get access to whatever hidden information there might be about this. I remembered Maxine’s seemingly innocuous questions about their deaths during that awful interview.

  Zac put an arm around me, and we slowly walked the few metres to join Peggy and James. Peggy said, ‘So you’re living above the plague pit, Zac?’

  He looked bewildered, which was not a look Zac often wore.

  ‘Didn’t Holly tell you?’ Peggy said.

  ‘No.’ He managed a joke. ‘I ought to ask for a discount on the rent.’ He turned to me, as if for help. ‘Holly?’

  ‘It’s just a story,’ I said.

  ‘You know it isn’t,’ Peggy said.

  ‘Are you going to tell me?’ Zac’s eyes were glittering at mine.

  ‘Hmm. I’m thinking I have to say yes to that.’ So I began. ‘In the mid-fifteenth century, five hundred people from the town were lost to the plague. The burial records for that period don’t survive, and the plague victims aren’t in the graveyard.’ A paper poppy petal, torn away from the body of the flower, floated above us, lifted by the wind. ‘So here is the question. Where were the poor souls put?’

  ‘Souls?’ Zac raised an eyebrow.

  ‘The thinking is that the bodies were loaded onto carts and taken along the coffin path. Then they were dumped into a pit. This was three kilometres along the coast, but slightly inland.’

  ‘Where you are.’ Peggy was fingering the cross that dangled from a silvery chain around her neck. ‘To rid the town of contagion.’ She glanced up at the smoky-blue sky, as if for heavenly support. ‘The pit is on the land behind your farmhouse. Your back garden, as a matter of fact. Nobody wants to live there. It’s supposed to be unlucky.’

  ‘Sounds like a load of superstitious …’ Zac paused to find a more polite term than whatever he’d been about to say. ‘It’s as likely as mermaids.’

  Peggy’s eyes narrowed. Her nostrils flared. To Peggy, an accusation of superstition was as bad as one of devil worship.

  ‘You know that mermaids are real.’ I was trying to tease the tension away. ‘I told you. You can’t live in St Ives and not believe in mermaids.’

  ‘True.’ He pulled my head against his chest. We were both thinking of the rough-hewn and time-scarred Mermaid Bench, the two of us holding hands as we knelt by the Mermaid in a kind of pledge to each other and to her.

  ‘Holly’s our little Ariel,’ Peggy said.

  Zac gave me some serious side-eye at this Disneyfication. I squeezed his hand, trying to communicate silent understanding as well as a plea for him not to start on a critique of the ‘sugary sentimentalism’ that he detested.

  I smiled at Peggy. I knew that she was picturing me and Milly, still tiny girls in pink nightdresses, snuggled against her during one of our countless sleepovers, the three of us eating popcorn and watching the Disney video.

  There was room in the world for all kinds of mermaids.

  Milly was gesturing for me to join her near the open church door, where she was standing by Gaston, whose hair was slicked into a ponytail. He broke up with her a few months ago, but Milly couldn’t get over it. She continued to sleep with him, and whenever they had sex it gave her false hope that he’d changed his mind.

  As I looked at Gaston, I was again struck by how strongly he resembled the character from the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, which was another of the films that Milly and I watched with Peggy when we were children. That one was our favourite, because Belle was a passionate reader, like me and Milly.

  Again Milly was beckoning me, this time even more frantically, but I shook my head no, not wanting to leave Zac when he was so palpably uncomfortable.

  ‘Milly needs you, sweetheart.’ Peggy was tugging at my arm. I looked helplessly at Zac as Peggy prised my hand out of his, deliberately ignoring the don’t-you-dare-leave-me-with-them look he was shooting at me. She gave me a push towards Milly that practically sent me flying.

  Milly was in tight jeans and sheepskin boots, a cream beanie hat covering her bright hair, seeming to know everyone, kissing old and young alike but making sure all the time that she kept within a metre of Gaston.

  I took a lock of her hair between my fingers, to peel off the purple acrylic gloop that had dried on it. ‘You’ve found some time to paint this morning?’

  She was glowing when she nodded yes. ‘At last. I got up early.’ She was so beautiful and cleverly funny that almost every man I ever met would want to go out with her. But she didn’t seem to know this.

  ‘I’m glad.’ I noticed Zac, pushing through the crowd to get to me.

  ‘Hi, Holly Dolly.’ Gaston’s voice was so booming that Zac sent a look his way that would vaporise other mortal beings.

  ‘Hello, Gaston.’ At least nobody could say I only used the name behind his back. Milly had given up on trying to stop me. I’d known since we were four that he would hurt her. Now that he actually had, I wanted to punch him in his rock-hard gut.

  ‘You know I consider that name a compliment, don’t you?’ He insisted on kissing me on the cheek, nearly choking me with his aftershave. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t love me.’

  ‘I really don’t.’

  Zac had reached me at last, and curled an arm tightly around my waist, pulling me close to his side. The gulls were wheeling above our heads.

  ‘The parade’s about to start, Holly.’ He aimed us in the direction of the War Memorial, but the crowd had grown so thick we couldn’t get close to Peggy and James. ‘I came here to support you, and you repay me by sneaking off to Milly and her boyfriend.’

  ‘Ex-boyfriend, now.’

  ‘I don’t care who he is.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t sneak, I don’t need to pay you, I didn’t mean to upset you, and I can promise you that talking to Gaston is not fun.’

  ‘Gaston? I hate those Disney names. You’re too intelligent for that.’

  The increasing decibel level as the marching band approached saved me from the need to say more, because the outdoor part of the ceremony was finally underway, and the buglers were sounding.

  They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old …

  My voice joined with the others, and I could feel Zac’s irritation melting away. He encased both of my hands inside his, and kept them that way through the two-minute silence.

  As we walked from the outdoor memorial to the church that towered over it, he whispered, ‘I’m sorry, Holly. I feel left out, sometimes, of your life here. You’re such a part of things.’

  ‘You are too.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Of course. It matters to me that you want to live here. I know you’re doing it for me. I’m moved by that.’

  We processed into the packed church together, and slipped into a pew at the rear. The pillars were garlanded in ribbons that had been strung with poppies. Zac did not bow his head for prayers or recite the Act of Penitence or sing any of the hymns, and certainly not ‘God Save the Queen’.

  After the service, he held my hand as we joined the parade, following the band and swin
ging our arms back and forth to ‘The British Grenadiers’. Zac sang along, and I loved that he knew every word. We were at the tail end, and when I finally glimpsed Milly and Peggy and James again, they were getting further and further ahead as we processed through the town.

  I tugged at Zac’s arm, smiling. ‘Shall we catch them up?’

  It was as if I had flicked a switch, turning him from happy to sad. ‘Don’t you want to be with me?’

  ‘Forever.’

  ‘The three of them are a family. It’s the two of us now.’ He smiled. ‘Or three. Yes?’ He put a hand on my tummy. ‘We’re making our own family. Aren’t we?’

  ‘Yes.’ I smiled up at him. When I broke his gaze, I realised that I had lost sight of my best friend and my surrogate parents. As far long as I could remember, I had walked with them, and until the last few years, with my grandmother too, claiming James’s arm during the Remembrance Sunday commemorations that St Ives did so beautifully.

  ‘Doesn’t that make you happy?’

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded to confirm it. ‘That’s a lovely thing. Yes.’ It was what I had always wanted. And I could see he was right about my not being a part of the family of three that was Peggy and James and Milly. But to be without them in that place, on that day, was like having a piece of myself cut away.

  Now The Backwards House

  Two years and five months later

  * * *

  Bath, Tuesday, 2 April 2019

  The country lane that Maxine’s driver is speeding along is lined with golden daffodils. They flutter and dance and twinkle on their green banks in exactly the way Wordsworth said.

  I have the sense that Maxine is watching me, though she is slumped against the cream-coloured leather car seat and seeming to look at her own lap, where her hands are resting. Her nails, as usual, are long and perfectly manicured. The polish is what my grandmother calls dragon-lady red, and matches Maxine’s lipstick. I have never seen a chip in that polish.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Not far.’ She answers like a parent. Or at least how I think parents answer, because my own have been dead for too long for me to know this from experience, and I am not a parent myself, however much I try to tell myself that she counted and I am.

  The car enters a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Bath. Because the houses here are built on top of old quarries, they get alarming cracks from subsidence, so walls split and ceilings buckle, hurling dark-grey plaster dust and chunks of building into the rooms.

  Maxine’s driver turns onto a street that is filled with police cars and vans, all clustered near a modern, brick, perfectly square end-of-terrace house. The house is surrounded by police tape. ‘Come on,’ Maxine says, and I follow her out of the car.

  I stand a couple metres away as Maxine speaks to a tall man with dark hair and dark-rimmed glasses, wearing a dark suit and standing outside of the cordon. He looks like the prince of death as he peers at me. I decide he is more likely to be MI5 than police as he nods at Maxine and says, ‘Tess’s up there. She’s expecting you.’

  Maxine moves her head to signal that we need to go into the tent that encloses the house’s front door. The door has an awning with a strange coating of artificial grass. We are given forensic suits, so that our hair is obscured by white hoods, our mouths and noses covered by white masks, and our shoes enveloped in white footwear protectors. I want to hesitate, but I don’t let myself. Maxine marches into the house, and I march after her.

  ‘Don’t touch or move anything,’ she tells me, without turning round.

  The carpet inside the entryway is mink-grey and I can see the tracks left by the vacuum, despite the ghost-shapes of old spills that no amount of shampoo will remove. The air is scented with pine and lemon, and window cleaner, plus the lingering hint of something that makes my stomach clench because it reminds me of Zac’s soap.

  ‘The burglar alarm wasn’t tripped,’ Maxine says. ‘She either de-activated it to let someone in, or didn’t activate it in the first place. Good chance she knew them.’

  ‘She. Who is she?’

  Maxine is making a performance of looking around too attentively to notice that I have spoken.

  The house seems the wrong way round, with the sitting room at the back, spanning the building’s entire width. There are no books on the shelves of the fake wood bookcases, and no dust either. There is a single half-drunk cup of strong black tea on the cheap glass coffee table. Not many people drink their tea with no milk. I’ve known two, and though Milly likes hers weak, and Zac strong, it came as a surprise that she and Zac should share anything other than their mutual hatred.

  The kitchen is to the left side of the entry hall. It is also pristinely clean, though far from luxurious with peeling laminate cupboards, a half-size fridge like my own, and cork flooring.

  At the bottom of the stairs is a handbag, stiff and upright, the obvious item in any game of odd one out. Tan leather, shiny gold hardware, and the Hermès logo in its cleanly embossed capital letters. Only once before have I come across a designer bag of this ilk.

  Maxine answers one of the many questions I haven’t voiced. ‘It was a two-month holiday let, paid by credit card. They haven’t traced the holder of the card, but it didn’t belong to the woman who was occupying the house. She moved in a week ago – used a false name.’

  We crunch our way up the stairs, along a roll of white paper. I can see on either side of it that the stairs have been sanded and painted.

  At the top of the landing, straight in front of us, is an open bedroom door. A tall woman in another moon suit, glasses peeping out of her otherwise-covered face, emerges and squeezes onto the landing with us. ‘Hey, Maxine,’ the woman says.

  ‘Hey, Tess.’ It isn’t the forensic drama that brings home the fact that I am being allowed to see another version of Maxine, who is not slouching. It is Maxine’s use of the word ‘Hey’ and its attendant chumminess.

  ‘Needless to say,’ says Tess, ‘don’t touch anything.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ Maxine says, in more of the new Maxine language.

  Tess does not ask who I am when she motions for us to follow her. There is a frizz of grey hair on her temple, which has escaped the head covering. There are smile lines around her eyes, and my guess is that in the part of her life that doesn’t involve space suits and corpses, this woman is restrainedly contented, with wry good humour.

  Instead of moving forward when Tess beckons, though, I freeze. My head is telling me to go in, but my body does not seem to want to.

  I’d thought the sweat had dried on me in Maxine’s car after my run, but I am wet again, beneath my breasts, down my spine. The mask over my mouth is stopping me from breathing. My scalp is itchy and hot beneath the hood.

  Maxine puts a hand on my shoulder. The last time she did that I practically chopped it off. She says, ‘You don’t know the strength of a person until they’ve been tested.’

  I nearly say, No shit, Sherlock, which is one of Milly’s favourite expressions. Milly loves the word shit. Instead, I manage a more restrained, ‘Thanks for your wisdom,’ and for the first time in forever, Maxine visibly blanches.

  Then The Forgotten Things

  Two years and four months earlier

  * * *

  Cornwall, Mid-December 2016

  Zac left for London early this morning for a British Cardiovascular Society symposium. Tomorrow he will fly to the Ukraine for a fleeting visit, to do some teaching in a hospital in Kiev. Before he drove away, I leaned into the open car window for a final kiss goodbye, my hair unbrushed and circles under my eyes after a night of endlessly being sick.

  I watched the car disappear out of sight, fantasising that I would get out my journal and write. Instead, I wandered through the house nibbling a special ginger biscuit that was supposed to help with nausea but was proving useless. I was ten weeks pregnant but the sickness wasn’t getting any better.

  Zac hated clutter, but this place was decorated in a romantic style that
seemed to invite it. The personal things were all mine – the cardigan thrown over the cabbage roses sofa, the pregnancy magazines covering the distressed coffee table, the pot of lip gloss and ponytail holder on the white-painted chimney piece, the novels on the chintz armchair. Zac was constantly putting them away, then scrubbing the artificially aged surfaces with disinfectant wipes. I was trying to be more orderly, because it was painful to see him so unnerved by what he would call mess and I would call the ordinary chaos of human life.

  Since Maxine’s ambush on the cliffs two months earlier, I’d stepped up my efforts to search the house for some sign of Jane. I poked my fingers into the toes of Zac’s socks when I tossed the clean pairs into the drawer. I ran my hand under the mattress when I made the bed. I examined the seams of his suits when I hung up his shirts from the dry cleaners. I checked his books as I dusted, to see if any were mere shells with cavities for hiding things. So far, I had found nothing. His taste in books, all hardbacks and dust-free, was unsurprising – medical ethics, law, artificial intelligence, and the surveillance state. He especially liked it when these subjects intersected. His current book at bedtime was about the use of technology by a group of anonymous hackers to promote political and social change.

  As I closed the lid of a shoebox that lived in his wardrobe – it contained a pair of unworn black Oxfords – I had a flash of Zac loading a new carbon-fibre suitcase onto the passenger seat of his sports car. Everybody saved their old suitcases for packing stuff when they moved, didn’t they? Before I had finished this thought I was rushing down the stairs to the cupboard that runs beneath them.

  My own suitcases were towards the front. I’d used them to transport my stuff from what I referred to as the brown house. My attic bedroom, with walls that I’d painted all the colours of the rainbow, was the one exception to the law of brown. The rest of the house was filled with brown carpets that my grandmother vacuumed every day, brown tapestry curtains that I was always opening and she was always closing, and brown sofas covered in bobbled brown blankets that I was always tearing off and she was always putting back. ‘I don’t want my fine furniture destroyed by the sun,’ my grandmother would say.