The Turn of the Key

“Well . . .” I said slowly. Thoughts flickered through the back of my head, their edges softened and blurred by the amount of wine I’d drunk earlier. I could ask him to bring the first aid supplies back here, couldn’t I? But a little part of me . . . okay, no, a big part of me . . . that part was curious. I wanted to go with Jack. I wanted to see inside his flat.

And, to be completely truthful, Mr. Wrexham, I wanted to get out of this house.

If you really thought there was a threat, how could you leave the kids to deal with it? It was the woman police officer who asked me that, barely trying to conceal her disgust as she asked the question.

And I tried to explain. I tried to tell her how the kids had seen nothing, heard nothing. How every little bit of malevolence had seemed to be directed solely at me. I had heard the footsteps. I was the one who had read those messages. I had been kept awake, night after night, by the noises and the doorbells and the cold.

None of the others, even Jack, had seen or heard what I had.

If there was something in that house, and even now I only half believed that there could be, in spite of everything that had happened, if there was, then it was out to get me. Me and the other four nannies who had packed up and left in a hurry.

And I just wanted five minutes out from its influence. Just five minutes, with the baby monitor in my pocket and the tablet with its surveillance cameras under my arm. Was that too much to ask?

The police officer didn’t seem to buy it. She just stood, shaking her head in disbelief, her lip curled with contempt for the stupid, selfish, careless bitch sitting opposite her.

But do you buy it, Mr. Wrexham? Do you understand, how hard it was, shut up there, night after night with nothing but the sound of pacing footsteps? Do you understand why just those few yards across the courtyard seemed like both nothing at all, and everything?

I don’t know. I’m not sure if I’ve managed to convince you, to explain what it was like, what it was really like.

All I can tell you is that I picked up the monitor, and the tablet, and I followed Jack as he crossed the kitchen and held open the back door for me, shutting it behind us both. I felt the warmth of his skin, as he shepherded me across the dark, uneven cobblestoned courtyard to the stairs up to his flat. And I mounted the stairs after him, watching the flex and shift of his muscles under his T-shirt as he climbed.

At the top he pulled a key out of his pocket, twisted it in the lock, and then stood back to let me pass inside.



Inside, I expected Jack to fumble for a panel or pull out his phone, but instead he reached out, flicked something, and as the lights came on, I saw a perfectly ordinary light switch made of white plastic. The relief was so absurd, and so great, that I almost laughed.

“Don’t you have a control panel?”

“No, thank God! These were designed as staff accommodation. No point in wasting technology on the likes of us.”

“I suppose so.”

He flicked on another light, and I saw a small, bright sitting room, furnished with good basics and a faded cotton sofa. The remains of a log fire smoldered in the little stove in the corner, and I could see a kitchenette on the far side. Beyond was another door, that I supposed was his bedroom, but it didn’t seem polite to ask.

“Right, sit here,” he said, pointing at the sofa, “and I’ll be back with a proper dressing for that cut.”

I nodded, grateful for the sense of being taken care of, but mostly just content to sit there, feeling the warmth of the fire on my face and the reassuringly cheap and cheerful Ikea cushions at my back while Jack rummaged in the kitchen cupboards behind me. The sofa was exactly like the one Rowan and I had back in our flat in London. Ektorp, it was called, or something like that. It had been Rowan’s mum’s before she handed it down to us. Guaranteed to last for ten years, with a washable cotton cover that had once been red, in Jack’s case, but had faded to a slightly streaky dark pink with sun and repeated launderings.

Sitting on it was like coming home.

After the luxurious split personality of Heatherbrae, there was something not just refreshing, but endearing about this place. It was solidly built, and all of a piece—no sudden disorienting switches from Victorian opulence to sleek futuristic technology. Everything was reassuringly homey, from the mug stains on the coffee table, to the medley of photos propped on the mantelpiece—friends and their kids, or maybe nieces and nephews. One little boy cropped up more than once, clearly a relative from the family resemblance.

I felt my eyes closing, two sleep-deprived nights catching up with me . . . and then I heard a cough and Jack was standing in front of me, a dressing and some disinfectant in one hand, and two glasses in the other.

“D’you want a drink?” he asked, and I looked up puzzled.

“A drink? No, I’m fine, thanks.”

“Are you sure? You might need something to take the edge off when I put this stuff on. It’s going to sting. And I think there’s a wee bit of glass or something still in there.”

I shook my head, but he was right. It did sting like fuck, first when he dabbed it with antiseptic, and then again when he pushed a pair of tweezers deep inside the cut, and I felt the sickening grind of metal against glass, and the sting of a forgotten shard sliding deeper into my finger.

“Fuck!” The groan slipped out without my meaning to voice it, but Jack was grinning, holding something bloodstained up at the end of his tweezers.