When the gate swung inwards and we began to climb the winding drive up to the house, I had a sharp flash of déjà vu back to that first evening—the way I had sat there beside Jack, scarcely able to breathe with hope and wanting.
We swung around the final curve of the drive, and the squat gray facade of the house came into view, and I remembered too the rush of emotion I had felt on seeing it for the first time, golden and warm and full of possibilities.
It looked very different today. Not full of the potential for a new life, new opportunities, but as gray and forbidding as a Victorian prison—only I knew that was a kind of a lie as well, that the Victorian facade presented to the driveway was only half the story, and that if I walked around to the back, I would see a house that had been ripped apart and patched back together with glass and steel.
Last of all, my gaze went to the roof, the stone tiles wet and slick with rain. The window Jack had shut was not visible from here; it opened onto the inner slope of the roof, but I knew that it was there, and the thought made me shiver.
There was no sign of Jean McKenzie’s car in the drive—she must have already left for the day—and both Jack and the dogs were nowhere to be seen, and somehow, what with everything that had happened, I could not bring myself to enter the house alone. It had come to something, I thought, as I parked the car and unclipped Petra from her seat, that even fending off the dogs from trying to put their noses up my skirt would have been a welcome distraction from the silent watchfulness of that house, with its glassy egg-shaped eyes observing me from every corner.
At least out here I could think and feel and speak without watching my every word, my every expression, my every mood.
I could be me, without fearing that I would slip up.
“Come on,” I said to Petra. Her buggy was in the boot of the car, and I opened it up and slid her in, clipping the rain cover over her. “Let’s go for a walk.”
“Me walk!” Petra shouted, pushing her hands against the plastic, but I shook my head.
“No, honey, it’s too wet, and you’ve not got your waterproofs on. You stay snug and dry in there.”
“Puggle!” Petra said, pointing through the plastic. “Jumpin muggy puggle!” It took me a minute to realize what she was saying, but then I followed her gaze to the huge pool of water that had collected on the gravel in the old stable yard, and understanding clicked.
Muddy puddles. She wanted to jump in muddy puddles.
“Oh! Like Peppa Pig, you mean?”
She nodded vigorously.
“You haven’t got your Wellies on, but look—”
I began to walk faster, and then jog, and then with an enormous splash, I ran, buggy and all, through the puddle, feeling the water spray up all around us and patter down on my anorak and the buggy’s rain cover.
Petra screamed with laughter.
“Again! More puggle!”
There was another puddle farther around the side of the house and obligingly I ran through that too, and then another on the graveled path down towards the shrubbery.
By the time we reached the kitchen garden, I was soaked and laughing, but also getting surprisingly cold, and the house was beginning to seem a little bit more welcoming. Full of cameras and malfunctioning tech it might be, but at least it was warm and dry, and out here my fears of the night before seemed not just silly, but laughable.
“Puggle!” Petra shouted, bouncing up and down underneath her clips. “More puggle!”
But I shook my head, laughing too.
“No, that’s enough, sweetie, I’m wet! Look!” I came round to stand in front of her, showing her my soaked jeans, and she laughed again, her little face scrunched up and distorted through the crumpled plastic.
“Woan wet!”
Woan. It was the first time she had made an attempt at my name, and I felt my heart contract with love, and a kind of sadness too—for everything I could not tell her.
“Yes!” I said, and there was a lump in my throat, but my smile was real. “Yes, Rowan is wet!”
It was as I was turning the buggy around to start the climb back up to the house that I realized how far we had come—almost all the way down the path that led to the poison garden. I glanced over my shoulder at the garden as I began to push the buggy up the steep brick path—and then stopped.
For something had changed since my last visit.
Something was missing.
It took me a minute to put my finger on it—and then I realized. The string tying up the gate had gone.
“Just a second, Petra,” I said, and ignoring her protests of “More puggles!” I put the brake on the buggy and ran back down the path to the iron gate, the gate where Dr. Grant had been photographed, standing proudly before his research playground, so many years ago, the gate I had tied up securely, in a knot too high for little hands to reach.
The thick white catering string had gone. Not just untied, or snipped and thrown aside, but gone completely.
Someone had undone my careful precautions.
But who? And why?
The thought nagged at me as I walked slowly back up the hill to where Petra was still sitting, growing increasingly fretful, and it continued to nag as I pushed the buggy laboriously back up the hill, to where the house was waiting.
*
By the time I reached the front door, Petra was cross and grizzling, and looking at my watch I saw that it was long past her snack time, and in fact getting on for lunch. The buggy’s wheels were caked with mud, but since I had left the key to the utility room on the inside, I had no option other than the front door, so at last I got her out of the buggy, folded it awkwardly with one hand, holding Petra against my hip with the other to stop her from running off in search of more puddles, and left it in the porch. Then I pressed my thumb to the white glowing panel, and stood back as the door swung silently open.