By seven, the sky was dusky, streaked with thin, wispy clouds of dark blue and people were starting to leave.
Zoe wandered through the house to gather up stray wineglasses and plates. She followed the sound of voices coming from upstairs, cursing when she saw that someone had spilled rosé wine on the runner, to find Win in the spare bedroom talking with a man from across the road who she was on nodding terms with.
The man was in his sixties, grey hair a mass of wild curls, and wearing a Ramones T-shirt, jeans and Birkenstocks. He had the benign, unfazed look of someone who’d lived well and partied hard. Zoe didn’t like to interrupt when he and Win were deep in conversation.
‘We bought our place in the eighties and all the period details, ceiling roses and whatnot, had been ripped out,’ the man was saying. ‘We even had these nasty fitted wardrobes with mirrored doors that took up half the bedroom. Oh, hello!’ he added as he caught sight of Zoe hovering in the doorway.
Win was leaning against the window sill, backlit by the sinking sun, his face pink from slaving over a hot barbecue all afternoon. ‘This is Geno from across the road. He lives next door to Peter the Drive Stealer.’
‘I think you know my wife, Trish,’ Geno said as he shook Zoe’s hand. ‘I was just saying to Win how lovely it’s been to have a good snoop round your house. Such a shame that it stood empty for all those years.’
‘Actually, Zo, Geno told me something about the house that gave me tingles all the way down my spine.’ Win shivered as if he felt them all over again.
‘Really? Good tingles?’ Zoe asked. ‘Or bad tingles?’
She sat down on the bed, Geno sat next to her and told her that before Pernicious Peter had bought his house ten years ago, it had been in the same family since it was built in 1936.
‘A woman called Anne lived there. She was in her fifties when we moved here, which was in nineteen eighty-four, and she’d inherited the house from her parents who’d bought it off-plan when she’d been five or six. Lovely woman, got Alzheimer’s, terrible way to go. So, one day, we asked her about your house and she said it had always been empty for all the time she’d lived there. When she first mentioned it, it was all quite vague but as the Alzheimer’s took hold, she became quite fixated on your house and the details became much clearer.’
Zoe waited patiently because it seemed, she hoped, that Geno was building up to something and Win, who’d already heard the story, looked as if he were about to burst with the effort not to chime in. ‘The details…’ Zoe prompted, because she couldn’t be patient any longer.
‘She said her family moved into their house in the July of nineteen thirty-six, just after Anne’s birthday. Your house wasn’t quite finished but they’d occasionally see a pretty red-headed woman coming and going and Anne’s mother would stop to say hello. Her name was Lizzy, Livvy… It’s twenty-odd years since I last heard this story so forgive me if I’m getting things muddled up.’
‘Libby,’ Zoe said. ‘The woman’s name was Libby.’
She glanced over at Win who raised his eyebrows as if he was intrigued too, despite all his dire warnings about getting involved with a ghost, a phantom.
Geno nodded. ‘Yes, that might be the name. So this woman was expecting a baby and getting the house ready for her and her husband to move in to but before that could happen, there was an incident in the December. Anne was very specific about the exact date, though I can’t remember it now. Apparently there was a terrible commotion in the street and most of the neighbours rushed out to see two men in the front garden of your house, door wide open, shouting and almost coming to blows with this Libby woman standing by the gate crying. Then she and one of the men disappeared up the road and the other man got into his car and drove away and that was the last anyone ever saw of her.’
Geno leaned back and looked with some satisfaction at Zoe who sat with her mouth hanging open. ‘Curious, isn’t it? You don’t know anything about who you bought the house from?’
‘It was a private sale,’ Zoe said. ‘We only dealt with the vendor’s solicitor.’
Win stirred. ‘They must have details of the original owner. They’d be on the deeds, I think.’
‘We could ask Parmy.’ Parminder, their friend and solicitor, worked from the ground floor of the house in Camden where Win’s accountancy practice occupied the first and second. Zoe got up. ‘I wonder if she’s still here. I could go and check.’
‘Or it can wait until Monday.’ Win smiled at Geno. ‘We found a suitcase when we moved in. It belonged to that woman, Libby —’
‘Short for Elizabeth.’ Zoe took over. ‘The suitcase had some of her things in it, but we’re not sure how it ended up in a cupboard in one of our bedrooms.’
‘How fascinating,’ Geno said, his eyes dancing. ‘A house not only with all its original features but a mystery to solve too.’
‘I’m very confused. Are we sure this happened in nineteen thirty-six? Because, according to her diary, Libby was pregnant in nineteen thirty-five, but she lost the baby.’ Zoe couldn’t reconcile the facts but to finally have Libby at their house, corroborated by an independent witness, was another piece of the puzzle slotting into place. A very important piece. Although now there were even more pieces missing. One of the men had to be Hugo, so who was the other man? And why had they all been so angry?
As the foundations of her own marriage seemed to crumble, it had been too painful to read about Libby coming between Hugo and his wife. But now Libby was back again. Almost close enough to touch and this time Zoe was determined not to let her dart out of reach.
Later that night, she left Win to finish unloading the dishwasher, and hurried upstairs to open the drawer of her nightstand and pull out the diary.
Zoe was a couple of months behind and her heart was pounding, hands clammy, as she skimmed to where she’d last left Libby at the end of July and an impending doctor’s appointment.
August 7th
I’m with child. Up the duff. Expecting. Enceinte. One in the oven. Pregnant.
I’m going to have Hugo’s baby and it seems fantastical, impossible, but the doctor says it’s so. It shouldn’t be possible to be this happy. I could die from this much happiness.
When Win came up to bed, he found Zoe sitting cross-legged on the floor, head hanging down, shoulders shaking from the force of her sobs.
He was at her side instantly, pulling her out of her slumped position, smoothing his fingers over her damp face. ‘What is it, Zo? What’s wrong?’
Zoe didn’t answer at first. She took several shuddering breaths then picked up the diary and thrust it at Win. ‘Libby did get pregnant again.’ She saw him take a few seconds to process this, remember who Libby was and why her pregnancy had such significance. ‘I have to find out what happened to Libby and the baby, because if everything worked out for her, then it will work out for us too. It will. I know it will.’
Win looked at the diary as if it were an unexploded bomb. ‘You do know that there’s no way that what happened to someone eighty years ago will have any effect, any bearing on you, on us, on our lives. That doesn’t make any sense.’ He looked at Zoe’s tear-streaked face, wiped away a streak of mascara with his thumb. ‘Is this really so important to you?’
‘Yes!’
‘OK. We’ll find out what happened to your Libby.’