The Turn of the Key

The girls were both tired after their day at school. They said nothing as we drove home, and the afternoon and evening passed without incident. They ate supper, took turns playing on the tablet, and then got into their pajamas and climbed into bed with barely a peep. When I went up at eight to turn out their lights and tuck them in, I heard an adult’s voice, coming over the speakers.

At first, I thought that they were listening to an audiobook, but then I heard Maddie say something, her small voice inaudible through the door, and the amplified voice on the speakers replied, “Oh darling, well done! Ten out of ten! I’m very proud of you. And what about you, Ellie? Have you been practicing your spellings too?”

It was Sandra. She had dialed into the children’s room and was talking to them before they fell asleep.

For a moment I stood, hovering outside the door, my hand on the doorknob, listening to their conversation, half hoping—half fearing—to hear something about myself.

But instead, I heard Sandra tell the girls to snuggle down, the lights dimmed, and she began to sing a lullaby.

There was something so loving, so personal about the simple act, Sandra’s voice wavering over the high notes, and tripping over an awkward lyric, that I was left feeling like an eavesdropper. I wanted, more than anything, to open the door, tiptoe in, and cuddle Maddie and Ellie, kiss their hot little foreheads, tell them how lucky they were to have a mother who at least wanted to be there, even if she couldn’t.

But I knew that would break the illusion that their mother was really present, and I backed away. If Sandra wanted to speak to me, no doubt she would dial down to the kitchen after she had finished.

While I ate and tidied up, I waited, slightly nervously, for the sound of her voice, crackling over the intercom, but it didn’t come. By 9:00 p.m. the house was silent and I locked up and went to bed with a feeling like walking on eggshells.

After I had done my teeth and turned out the lights, I lay down in bed, feeling my limbs ache with weariness. My phone was in my hand, but instead of plugging it in to charge and going straight to sleep, I found myself googling Dr. Grant again.

I stared at his photo for a long time, thinking of Mrs. Andrews’s words in the café. There was something about the contrast between that first picture and the last that was almost shocking, something that spoke of long nights of grief and agony—perhaps even in this very room. What had it been like to live here all those years, with the local gossip swirling around him, and the memories of his daughter so stark and painful?

Returning to the search screen, I typed in “Elspeth Grant death Carn Bridge” and waited as the links came up.

There was no photo—at least none that I could find. And she had not had much of an obituary, just a passage in the Carn Bridge Observer (now defunct), stating that Elspeth Grant, much loved daughter of Dr. Kenwick Grant and the late Ailsa Grant, had died in St. Vincent’s Cottage Hospital on 21st October 1973, aged eleven years.

Another brief piece a few weeks later, this time in the Inverness Gazette, recorded the results of a postmortem and inquest on Elspeth’s death. It seemed she had died from eating Prunus laurocerasus, or cherry laurel berries, which had been accidentally made into jam. The berries were apparently easily mistaken for cherries or elderberries by inexperienced foragers, and it was thought that the child had gathered them herself and brought them to the housekeeper, who had simply tipped them into the pan without checking. Dr. Grant never ate jam himself, preferring porridge and salt, the housekeeper did not live in and took her meals at her own house in the village, and Elspeth’s nanny had resigned her post almost two months before the incident, so Elspeth was the only person to ingest the poison. She had become unwell almost straightaway and had died of multiple organ failure, in spite of strenuous efforts to save her.

A verdict of misadventure was brought, and no charges were filed as a result of her death.

So. Elspeth had been the only person who was ever in danger of eating that jam. I could see why gossip had arisen—though quite why it had settled on Dr. Grant, and not the unnamed housekeeper, was unclear. Perhaps it had been a case of local people looking after their own. And what of the nanny? She had resigned “just two months before,” according to the writer of the piece, who managed to put the simple phrase in such a way as to make it sound both innocent and suggestive, but presumably she could have had nothing to do with the incident, or it would have been raised at the inquest. Her absence had been noted purely in connection with the fact that Elspeth had been unsupervised at the time of picking the berries, and therefore, by inference, was more likely to make a slip concerning identification of the plants.

The more I pondered the idea, though, the more problems there seemed to be with the suggestion that Elspeth had gathered the berries by accident. I was a 1990s child of the suburbs, totally unused to fruit picking, and even I had a vague idea of what laurel looked like compared to elderberry. Would the daughter of a poisons expert with a locked garden explicitly dedicated to deadly plants really make such a slip?

Rereading the piece, I felt a sudden surge of sympathy for the nanny, the missing link in the case. She was not interviewed. Whatever had become of her was not stated. But she had missed, by just a few weeks, the possibility of being embroiled in scandal. What future was there for a nanny whose child had died in her care, after all? A very bleak one indeed.

*

I’m not sure when I finally drifted off, my phone still in my hand, but I know that it was very late when a sudden sound jerked me from sleep. It was a ding-dong noise, like a doorbell, not one of my usual alerts. I sat up, blinking and rubbing my eyes, and then realized the noise was coming from my phone. I stared at the screen. The Happy app was flashing. Doorbell sounding, read the screen. It came again, a low bing-bong that seemed to be able to override all my do-not-disturb settings. When I pressed the icon a message flashed up. Open door? Confirm / Cancel.