“He is not here.”

“Oh, well, will he be back later?”

“He gone. New family now.”

“Wh-what do you mean?”

“He and his wife moved last year. Different country. Scotland. New family is here now. Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright.”

Oh. Fuck.

It was like a punch to the gut.

“Do you . . . do you have an address?” I asked, my voice faltering, and she shook her head. There was pity in her eyes.

“Sorry, I do not have, I am just cleaning.”

“You—” I swallowed hard. “You mentioned a wife. Mrs. Elincourt. Can I ask—what’s her name?”

I don’t know why that was suddenly important to me. Only that I knew the trail had gone cold, and any scraps of information seemed better than nothing. The cleaner looked at me sadly. Who did she think I was? A spurned girlfriend? A former employee? Or maybe she had guessed the truth.

“She called Sandra,” she said at last, very quietly. “I must go now.” And then she turned and made her way back into the house.

I turned too and began the long walk back to Highgate, saving the bus fare. There was a hole in my shoe, and as I started up the hill, it began to rain, and I knew I had lost my chance.

*

After that I didn’t try looking again in earnest for a few years. And then, one day, when I was idly typing Bill Elincourt into Google, there it was. The advert. With a house in Scotland. And a wife called Sandra.

And a family.

And suddenly, I couldn’t not.

It was like the universe had set this up for me—to give me a chance.

I didn’t want him to be my dad, not now, not after all these years. I just wanted to . . . well, just to see, I suppose. But obviously, I couldn’t travel up to Scotland under my own name without telling him who I was, and setting up a whole weight of expectation and potential rejection. Even with nearly thirty years of water under the bridge, it was unlikely that Bill would have forgotten the name of his firstborn daughter, and Gerhardt was unusual enough as a surname for him to do a double take, and register it as that of the mother of his child.

But I didn’t need to go under my own name. In fact, I had a better name, a better identity, just ready and waiting for me. One that would get me through the front door without any strings attached, at which point I could do whatever I wanted. And so I picked up the papers that Rowan had left so temptingly lying around in her bedroom—the papers that were, almost, going to waste. The papers so very, very close to my own that really, it didn’t seem like much of a deception at all.

And I applied.

I didn’t expect to get the job. I didn’t even want it. I just wanted to meet the man who had abandoned me all those years before. But when I saw Heatherbrae, I knew, Mr. Wrexham. I knew that one visit was never going to be enough for me. I wanted to be a part of all this, to sleep in the softness of those feather beds, to sink into the velvet sofas, to bask under the rainwater showers—to be a part of this family, in short.

And I wanted, very, very badly, to meet Bill.

And when he didn’t appear at the interview, I could see only one way to make that happen.

I had to get the job.

But when I did . . . and when I met Bill that first night, and realized the kind of man he was, God, it’s like a metaphor for this whole thing, Mr. Wrexham. It’s all connected. The beauty and luxury of this house, and the seeping poison underneath the high-tech facade. The solid Victorian wood of a closet door, with its polished brass escutcheon—and the cold, rank smell of death that breathes out of the hole.

There was something sick in that house, Mr. Wrexham. And whether Bill had been sick when he went there and brought it with him, or whether he had caught its sickness and become the man I met on that first night, that predatory, abusive man, I don’t know.

All I know is that the two run hand in hand, and that if you scratched the walls of Heatherbrae House, scoring the hand-blocked peacock wallpaper with your nails, or gouging the polished granite tiles, that same darkness would seep out, the darkness that lay very close beneath Bill Elincourt’s skin.

Don’t look for him. That was one of the few things my mother had said to me about him, before she shut off the subject completely. Don’t look for him, Rachel. Nothing good will come of it.

She was right. God, she was so right. And how I wish I’d listened to her.

“Come on,” I said at last. “Up to bed, Rhiannon. You’re tired, I’m tired, we’ve both had too much to drink . . . We’ll talk about all this in the morning.”

I’d ring Sandra and explain. Somehow. With my head aching from the beginnings of a hangover, and tiredness scratching at the back of my eyes, I could not quite think of the words, but they would come. They would have to. I couldn’t carry on like this, being blackmailed by Rhiannon.

For a moment, as I climbed the stairs, Rhiannon in front of me, I had an absurd mental picture of Sandra welcoming me with open arms, telling me I completed their family, telling me— But no. That was ridiculous, and I knew it. Even the most generous of women would take time to adjust to a long-lost stepchild turning up, and to find out this way, in these circumstances . . . well. I had no illusions how the conversation was likely to pan out. Difficult would be the best-case scenario.

Well, I had made my bed, and I would have to lie on it. I would almost certainly be sacked—I couldn’t really see any way around that. But I was fairly sure that Bill would not want to sue his estranged daughter, to whose mother he had paid just pennies in child support, before disappearing for good. It would not be a good look for Elincourt and Elincourt. No, it would be swept under the rug, and I’d be free to carry on. Alone.