Black Rabbit Hall (16 page)

‘Amber. Toby. The window.’ There is an edge to Daddy’s voice as he refills his whisky glass from the crystal decanter. ‘You’ll regret it if you don’t.’

Curiosity gets the better of us. We yank back the heavy velvet curtain and gasp. Huge, furry white snowflakes are tumbling down in the golden light of the window, spiralling, swimming, in the wind.

‘Wow!’ Barney starfishes his hands on the glass. ‘Is the snow real?’

Caroline cups his tiny shoulder. ‘As real as you or me, Barney.’

‘But it never snows at Black Rabbit Hall,’ says Toby, frowning. Something about it really bothers him, doesn’t add up. ‘It never snows by the sea.’

‘Well, it does now, Toby.’ Caroline lifts her chin, staring out of the window with a look of unmistakable triumph. ‘Isn’t this all just too perfect for words?’

I buck awake, hands protecting my face from falling, and lie there panting in the darkness. How dare Lucian? How dare he hurt Toby, then hide away? I won’t let him hide any longer.

I tug the lamp switch, squint through the shade’s peachy fringing, adjusting to the light. Out of my warm bed, a slap of cold. Avoiding the floorboard directly outside my door that squeaks like a kitten, I close my bedroom door carefully, leaving the comforting glow of lamplight, and pad along the corridor to Toby’s room. I hover outside, listening hard – nothing stirring, good, he’d go mad if he knew where I’m going – then check on Barney and Kitty, as I always do when I wake in the night, just to be sure they’re not dead.

They are both in Barney’s bed, a sticky tangle of curls and limbs, crushed against the patch of wall where Barney sticks his flapping collection of bloodied plasters, trophies of cut knees and thorned fingers. There’s a faint smell of wee. Kitty’s bottom is in the air. Barney’s elbow is jutting into Kitty’s nostril. The book I read them before bed –
Milly Molly Mandy
– is crumpled beneath the pillow. Raggedy Doll dangles over it, head first, arms outstretched. I tuck
her next to Kitty, slide the book out and watch them breathe sweetly for a moment. Then I kiss them both on the forehead and tiptoe out. My anger feels wrong in here.

I hesitate at the landing window outside their room – the floorboards drenched with mercury moonlight – and breathe out a mask on the glass. Outside the whiteness is as still and flat as milk. I think about how much Momma would have loved to see Black Rabbit Hall like this, the fields, the woods all iced. And I think of how fierce she would have been if someone had hurt Toby.

She’s not here. But I am.

Anticipating the twist at the top of the stairs, my fingertips brush something solid in the liquorice dark. I jump, fisting my hands. But it’s only the grandfather clock – the noisy little brother of the one in the hall, Momma called it. I try to read its pearly face: two a.m., which means it’s probably nearer three. Late, far too late, but Toby made confronting Lucian impossible before bed and I couldn’t risk getting Toby involved. I will just have to wake Lucian.

But there’s already a thin stripe of light beneath Lucian’s door. I creep towards it and stand outside, lining up insults on my tongue, ready to be spat out like hard peas.

‘Who’s there?’ The door springs open. I’m not sure who is more shocked to see the other. My insults aren’t ready.

His eyes round with surprise. Then he lets out a low, relieved whistle. ‘I thought you were Toby.’

I scramble myself together from the unlikely sight of him in blue striped pyjamas. ‘I know what you did.’

‘Better come in, then.’ He opens the door wider for me like the gentleman he isn’t.

Over his shoulder I see embers glowing invitingly in the
grate. But something stops me stepping into his room, as if there’s an invisible line I must not cross. This is already not how I imagined it.

‘Freeze in the corridor, if you prefer.’

I put my chin up and stride in, as if I was about to anyway.

There is a distinct smell in the room. Smoke. Cigarettes. Something else. A bit like Toby but different. I don’t quite know where to stand, or where to look.

‘Just thrown the last log on, sorry.’ He sits down on his bed, tugs up a blanket. ‘Want this?’

‘No, thank you.’ I’d rather get frostbite than accept a blanket from Lucian. Still, I curse myself for not putting on my dressing-gown. For wearing a nightie covered with rainbows and looking like Wendy from
Peter Pan
. Worse than his pyjamas. Much worse.

‘You’re shivering.’

‘I’m used to winters at Black Rabbit Hall.’ My voice is clipped, furious, gritted against the chill. ‘But I’m not used to idiots like
you
.’

He looks at me as if I’ve suddenly become more interesting. ‘Black Rabbit Hall,’ he repeats, a slow smile curling his mouth. ‘I want to see the silhouettes on the lawn. Failing the timely appearance of a bunny, will you stand against the setting sun tomorrow so I can test the theory?’

‘Don’t be soft.’ I sneak a quick glance around the room, the stack of novels – some French! – the neck of a guitar resting against his bed. It looks so much more grown-up than Toby’s room, which is littered with stray socks and ancient copies of the
Boy’s Own Paper
. I haven’t seen a guitar close up since visiting Aunt Bay in New York. We only
have classical instruments at school. Guitars – not a respectable instrument for a girl – are forbidden. My eye is sucked towards it.

Seeing my interest, he reaches across the bed for it, settles it like a baby in his lap and fingers the strings, silently mimicking a chord. I notice the pink bruising on his knuckles. That hand smashed Toby’s face.

‘What sort of music do you like?’ His eyes flicker across my chest, linger there for one tiny moment before he pulls them away.

I cross my arms, fighting a wave of self-consciousness. I don’t have a clue how to answer his question. It occurs to me that he looks right holding a guitar, as I might holding a book, like they belong together somehow.

‘Is it that embarrassing?’ There’s mischief in his eyes now. Clearly he’s enjoying me standing here in my nightie, caught in the glare of what suddenly seems an extremely bright bedside light.

‘Sod off.’

He plucks a string on his guitar. It shivers sweetly in the silence. ‘You know, I always spend Christmas in Hampstead with my grandmother, which is pretty bloody dull but preferable to this.’

‘We don’t want you here, Lucian. You or your mother.’

‘The feeling is mutual,’ he says mildly, plucking the string again. ‘Ma normally celebrates on a black run at Gstaad. God knows why she’s dragged me here.’

‘You mean she doesn’t spend Christmas with you?’ I ask, forgetting I’m not in the least interested.

‘You obviously don’t know my mother.’

‘And nor do I want to.’

He doesn’t look up from the guitar.

‘You punched Toby in the woods, idiot,’ I hiss. My armpits are wet, despite the chill spiking the hairs along my arms. ‘Worse, you hid afterwards. You are … pathetic.’

‘And you are some wildcat,’ he says, a confusing note of admiration in his voice.

‘Is that all you have to say?’ My voice shakes. ‘No apology? No – no explanation?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You’re lucky Toby didn’t report it to Daddy. But I want you to know that
I
will, Lucian.’ I reach for the brass door handle, use it to steady myself. ‘I will tell Daddy every detail of this conversation in the morning! And he will demand that you and your mother leave immediately.’

‘Something to look forward to, then.’

I stomp out of the door, then stop. Something doesn’t make sense. ‘Tell me why you did it,’ I say, back still turned.

‘I don’t have to tell you anything.’

I whip round. ‘Toby’s my twin brother.’

He rolls his eyes. ‘Yeah, I rather got that.’

‘Just tell me.’

Lucian stares down at the guitar, rubs its neck with his thumb. For the first time I see vulnerability in him, a hesitation in his long, slim fingers. ‘Amber, it’s no big thing. There was a skirmish in the woods, that’s all.’

‘A skirmish?’ I lean on the door, close it behind me, its ridged wooden panels pressing into my spine.

‘After I saw you this afternoon, I went down to the river and there was Toby, sitting on a tree, this massive old tree with a rope dangling down. He was carving it up. We got … talking.’

‘What about?’ My scalp starts to creep.

‘Well, he kind of accused me of …’ he clears his throat, falters ‘… er, staring at you at lunch.’

‘Staring at
me
?’

‘Those weren’t his exact words. But if you want the gist, that was it, yes.’

‘Well, how … how insane.’ I twist a snake of my hair around my finger, no longer sure where to take the conversation. My face is on fire. Was Lucian staring at me at lunch? I was so determined not to look in his direction, twisting away from him, that I wouldn’t have seen. ‘How perfectly stupid.’

‘I’m genuinely sorry about your brother’s eye.’ His are so dark they’re almost entirely black, embers flickering in each.

‘You don’t look very sorry.’ I sniff, trying to hide my embarrassment.

‘I don’t say things I don’t mean.’ He shoves the guitar to one side and sits up on the bed, bending at an awkward angle, feet on the rug.

My eye is drawn to a dark crease on his red pyjama top. ‘What’s that?’

Lucian looks down, pulls the fabric away from his stomach.

‘It looks like … blood.’

‘Knocked an old rugby scratch.’

More blood spilt at Black Rabbit Hall! I clamp my hand to my mouth, wondering what I’ll tell Caroline if he dies.

‘Don’t look spooked.’ He yanks up his pyjama top. ‘Nothing, see?’

It’s about three inches long, a thin, straight gash, like a scissor slit in a pillow. ‘You need the village doctor.’

‘No, I don’t.’ He laughs.

‘Your mother. I’ll get her.’

‘No! Not Ma
.
Jesus. Don’t even think about it. Just find me some tissue or something, will you?’

I try to remember the St John Ambulance first-aid lesson at school as I run into the bathroom, yank a towel off the hook and fold it up to make a pad with trembling fingers. When I get back into the bedroom Lucian is naked from the waist up. My breath catches in my throat. I squat down, wishing I’d never visited his room or asked any questions and, not knowing what else to do – he doesn’t take the towel – start to wipe the blood off his smooth, firm skin, refusing to look at the wiry V of sooty hair that arrows down from his belly button to an unknowable place beneath his waistband. The wound is superficial, but surgical. ‘It doesn’t look like a rugby scratch,’ I say primly.

His stomach muscles clench. And I know then. I close my eyes, prepare myself, like you do on a fairground ride, rising up, up, up, ready for the horror-swoop down. ‘Toby?’ I whisper, barely able to breathe the word out.

‘Stupid penknife.’ His voice is so low and restrained that I know he doesn’t want to tell me, any more than I want to hear it. But we’re holed up in this room in the dead of the night, the snow swirling outside the window, and it suddenly seems impossible that either of us could say anything that wasn’t true.

‘I don’t think he meant to, Amber,’ Lucian says, with an unexpected gentleness that makes me want to cry. ‘He just wanted to frighten me. Things went too far.’

‘Toby’s not a bad person.’ I can’t stop my voice breaking, imagining Daddy’s fury when he finds out. ‘He – he just gets angry sometimes.’

‘I know. It’s all right.’

Struggling not to cry, I drop the towel to the floor. The wound is dry now. ‘Why didn’t you tell?’

‘I understand, that’s all.’

Everything I thought I knew about Lucian Shawcross starts to slip and slide beneath me, like melting snow. But I’m still not sure whether to believe him.

We sit in silence for a few moments. The embers in the fire flare up one last time, then fade to black, making the room feel dreamy, under water. ‘My dad died.’

‘Oh.’ Now I believe him.

‘It was snowing then too.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He shrugs. ‘It’s not like it happened at Easter or anything.’

There’s not much to say after that: it cuts through the soft stuff straight to the bone. We both know things that most people our age don’t. We’ve both had to stick ourselves back together again. Rotten luck. That’s it, really.

‘I’d better go.’ I stand up quickly, a sweet heat puffing out from my nightie. Not looking back over my shoulder, though I long to do so, I climb up the stairs in the moonlight, trying to take it all in. But there’s too much to fit: a night tucked within the night. I feel more awake than I have ever been. As if I will never sleep again. The grandfather clock says it is three. Can an hour really have passed? Where did it go?

As I creep along the landing towards my bedroom, I
notice that the door is ajar and my lamp is off, even though I left it on. Something moves in the darkness, shifts on the springs of my bed. ‘Toby?’ I push open the door slowly, safe only for a few more seconds, fear a moth in my stomach. ‘Toby, is that you?’

Lorna

‘Yes, Lorna, there was a – a Toby who lived here once, a long time ago,’ stutters Dill, the back of her wrist pressed to her forehead, as if the name hurts her head. She heaves Lorna’s weekend bag to the leather luggage rack, making it wobble. ‘Oh dear, towels. I forgot your towels.’ She tuts, although Lorna senses she’s grateful for the distraction. ‘I knew I’d forget something.’

‘Toby is Mrs Alton’s son?’ Lorna perseveres. She can still feel the ridges in the rough bark beneath her fingertips, the names of those children, and she cannot stop thinking about them. It’s hard to believe she kissed Jon goodbye and caught the train from London only this morning. Black Rabbit Hall has already reeled her in, pushed her other life back.

‘Oh, no, not her son,’ says Dill, looking startled by the idea. ‘No, no. Her stepson. Let’s get some air in here.’ She pulls back the floral curtains, flings the sash window up, as if trying to disperse Lorna’s questions with a bracing breeze. ‘That’s better.’

Lorna joins her at the window. The view is different from how she remembers it, simultaneously bigger and more intimate. The sweep of lawn makes her think of an
outdoor summer stage, the players long departed. But
not
forgotten. No child should ever be forgotten. ‘So, Dill, this tree in the woods …’

‘We’re all running rather late. Mrs Alton will be waiting for her tea in the sunroom,’ Dill says, backing out of the door. ‘She doesn’t much like a late tea.’

If Mrs Alton is impatient for her tea she has the manners not to show it. Dressed in slacks and a cloud-blue bouclé collarless jacket that has matted with age – there is an air vent of moth holes in a perfect circle on the left shoulder – but looks suspiciously like the Chanel ones that go for small fortunes in the better vintage shops, she is sitting very still in a snug, goldfinch-yellow room. She steeples her fingertips together, presses them lightly against her lips. ‘You got lost in the woods, I gather.’

‘I did,’ Lorna admits. ‘I’m very sorry if I’ve made you wait.’

‘Oh, those paths were purposely designed to make a visitor lose their bearings. Some sort of Alton mischief at the turn of the nineteenth century, I believe. Do sit. You look quite flushed by your little adventure.’

Mrs Alton’s cool detachment is the kind to bring out a fluster in anyone, Lorna thinks, careful not to put her elbows on the linen-covered table. She feels grateful for her mother’s insistence on good table manners.

‘Tea.’ Dill slides an Oriental black tray, the lacquer peeling off in long, curled shards, in front of them. ‘A slice of ginger cake, Lorna?’

The cake is a gleaming bronze ingot. ‘Oh, yes, please. It looks delicious.’

‘I simply cannot function without Dill’s ginger cake,’ says Mrs Alton, slicing into hers with the side of a dull silver cake fork.

‘My mother’s recipe,’ Dill explains, looking surprised and pleased, as if such a compliment is rare.

‘One of the more digestible,’ adds Mrs Alton, briskly.

The cake pirouettes on Lorna’s tongue. It’s the best she’s ever tasted, and she’s tasted a lot. Before she can say so, Dill vanishes from the room, soundless as a kitchen cat.

‘So the grounds are romantic, are they not, Lorna?’ Mrs Alton dabs at the corners of her mouth with a threadbare linen napkin that looks like it’s been boil-washed every day since the fifteenth century. ‘A perfect backdrop for a wedding?’

‘They are the most beautiful grounds I’ve ever seen.’

Mrs Alton picks up her teacup between finger and thumb, brings it to her pursing lips and sips. ‘Excellent.’

‘Mrs Alton, I found this tree beside the river …’ Lorna begins gently, not wanting to disturb any buried grief, but curiosity getting the better of her. The room may be still – all old rooms feel still, undisturbed by WiFi clouds and hidden wiring or whatever it is that makes the air in modern houses jiggle – but her mind is racing at a million miles an hour. Even as she sits there, she feels like she’s in motion. ‘… covered with sort of carvings, names.’

‘I am aware of such a tree.’ Mrs Alton sighs, as if Lorna has disappointed her by mentioning it. The arrowhead deepens between her eyebrows and her gaze hardens over the rim of her cup, daring Lorna to probe any further. ‘It is diseased and must come down.’

‘Oh, no, you must leave it! It’s part of the house’s history.’

‘It’s
one
history, Lorna.’ She clinks her cup to the saucer sharply. ‘In a family such as mine there are many, many histories, most of which contradict each other. We cannot be sentimental about them all. Now, would you be so kind as to cut me another sliver of cake? I find it is quite pointless to deny oneself a second slice at my stage of life.’

‘I quite agree.’ Using a heavy blunt silver knife, she cuts a fat piece, probably too fat because it makes Mrs Alton’s left eyebrow arch. And although she’d happily eat another herself, a genius idea freezes the knife mid-air. ‘Mrs Alton, I’ve an idea about how you might establish a successful wedding business here on the estate.’

‘Really?’ She brings a dainty morsel of cake to her mouth. ‘Do go on.’

Lorna leans forwards over the table, forgetting all about her elbows. ‘Can I be frank?’

‘I have no time to waste on those who are not.’

‘Well, the website isn’t very … enticing.’ She is being diplomatic: the ‘website’ consists of a grainy photo, an elusive address – ‘Pencraw Hall, Roseland, Cornwall’ – and a grab of text, ‘Site under construction.’

‘I see,’ Mrs Alton says curtly, laying her fork on her plate. The thunderous expression on her face suggests that frankness might be a relative concept. ‘Believe me, Lorna, it is little short of a miracle that we have one at all.’

‘I … I just mean that the website doesn’t quite do the house justice.’

‘Endellion will be taking some more photographs. What
she lacks in skill she makes up for in quantity. That should do it.’

‘What about the house’s history? Everyone will want to know that.’

‘They will?’

‘Mrs Alton, this is a venue for people who, like me, love old stuff, couples looking for somewhere far removed from the modern and everyday.’ She recalls the other bland, anonymous wedding venues that left her cold and tries to work out what was missing. ‘For authenticity too. A peep inside your world.’

‘A peep inside my world? None of their darned business.’ A crumb of ginger cake dislodges from her front tooth, torpedoes across the table and lands on Lorna’s wrist.

‘I’m talking purely from a commercial point of view, Mrs Alton.’ She’s not, of course, but she lets the words hang there, wonders when she’s going to have an opportunity to discreetly wipe away the cake crumb.

‘You are certain it would bring in more business?’

‘I would think so. It doesn’t need to be much information, nothing intrusive, just a little bit of background.’ She takes a deep breath, goes for it. ‘I’d be very happy to help you.’

Mrs Alton’s eyes narrow. ‘It won’t get you a discount, you know.’

‘Of course not! I’d just love to do it as a thank-you for my stay. I’m a quick writer. It wouldn’t take long and it would be a pleasure, really. I find that sort of thing fascinating. History is my favourite subject to teach at school,’ she adds, fearing she might be overdoing it.

‘I see.’ Mrs Alton doesn’t withhold the scepticism from her voice.

In the awkward hush, Lorna hears the house creak and sigh, as if the stone and wood and crumbling lime mortar are also trying to make up their minds about the urban imposter.

‘More cake, ladies?’ asks Dill, pushing open the door, eyeing them curiously. ‘Everything all right?’

Lorna holds her breath, doesn’t dare look up. She’s about to get asked to leave. Well, that was fun. All four hours of it.

The old lady clears her throat with a bullet crack. ‘Lorna has had the audacity to suggest we flip the family’s bed sheets for public inspection, Endellion.’

Christ! ‘Mrs Alton, I really didn’t mean –’

‘And I think it’s about time, don’t you?’ Mrs Alton stands slowly, levering herself up with bunched knuckles on the table. ‘But I’ll need a stiff drink in the drawing room first. Sherry, please, Endellion. Not the finest.’

When they pass the moon-dial clock in the hall it says midnight. But Lorna’s watch says five. Neither time feels right. The drawing-room walls are a dark foggy blue and the spitting fire in the grate that Dill has hurriedly lit makes the room airlessly sleepy, as if caught in the late unreal hours of a cold winter’s night. Thick grey woodsmoke curls up the huge chimney before changing its mind and rolling slowly back into the room like a sea fog, making Lorna’s eyes water and the back of her throat burn. The sherry doesn’t help either. Feeling disoriented, she licks a finger – it tastes inexplicably of the milky sap of a dandelion stalk,
a bitter grassiness recalled from childhood – and flips the page of her notebook.

An hour later it is scribbled with random facts about the house, bouncing back and forth in time like a confused student’s notes: Pencraw, in the Alton family for five generations, bought with trade money – sugar, originally – from a duke ‘with far too many houses, a thoroughly spoilt wife, running out of cash’; used as a convalescent hospital for injured troops during the First World War, taking in at least twenty evacuee children in the Second; farmland, once extensive, now largely sold off; ditto, most of the estate cottages; the house itself coming near to destruction, demolition being cheaper than its upkeep, in the early 1950s, as did its infamous rabbits, hit by myxomatosis; a glorious Reynolds in the drawing room, where a smuggler’s landscape now hangs, scandalously auctioned off by her husband Hugo’s grandfather; a rogue alcoholic heir, Sebastian, who, hallucinating on absinthe, simply stepped off a yacht in the Med, naked but for his Panama hat, and drowned, much to everyone’s relief; a yew tree in the garden, ‘older than America’; Princess Margaret, who once came to a party, danced all night, and left behind a long white silk glove, now stored in a drawer but no one can remember exactly which. There are many.

The more recent family history is harder to tease out. Sketchy, elliptical, it escapes from Mrs Alton inadvertently in small salty drops, each one leaving Lorna thirstier than the last: Hugo’s ‘horribly beautiful’ first wife, who ‘couldn’t survive her horse’, four stepchildren including ‘disturbed, difficult twins’, her own son, Lucian – whose name Mrs Alton voices in a low, husky whisper – and an
admission that the role of stepmother ‘was not one in which I particularly excelled’, spoken with notably little, if any, regret.

As they talk, the carriage clock ticks and the flames start to crackle salt-blue. Smoke hangs in the corners of the room, just out of reach, like the stories Lorna is after. Lorna realizes she’s been circling Barney, not daring to ask directly about his death: she fears Mrs Alton’s reaction, an explosion of grief, and knows that she won’t be able to shake the details from her head once she’s let them in. No one can forget the death of a child. It goes against the natural order of things. And order – age, gender, status – in a grand family, she is beginning to grasp, is everything. Defying it is dangerous. Defying it leaves elderly women living alone in vast damp houses, throttled by their precious, worthless strings of pearls.

‘I have made mistakes, Lorna,’ Mrs Alton says abruptly.

‘Everyone makes mistakes with houses, Mrs Alton.’ Lorna warms her sherry glass in the cup of her hand. The first two sips were challenging, but she’s grown to rather like it. ‘You should hear some of Jon’s building site stories.’

Mrs Alton shakes her head, mouth pursed tight. ‘Not
those
kind of mistakes.’

‘Oh.’ The candid turn in the conversation catches in Lorna’s throat, making her splutter on the smoke.

‘I was like some of our hens, Lorna, no maternal instinct at all. I was supposed to have one, all women were back then, but I didn’t. I found that rather difficult. And those stepchildren – Amber, Toby, Barney, Kitty – I … I found …’ She searches for the right word, shaking her head. ‘… unfathomable.’

‘I’m sure you did your best, Mrs Alton.’ She reaches out and touches Mrs Alton’s arm lightly.

Mrs Alton jolts, stares at Lorna’s hand, startled by the human touch. ‘Obviously, I’d rather you didn’t include any mention of such in
l’histoire
,’ she says coolly.

‘Of course not.’ Lorna removes her hand, retreats to her sherry glass. ‘It’s your story, not mine. You only share what you’re comfortable with.’

But Mrs Alton doesn’t look comfortable now, not at all. She is agitating her pearls with crooked fingers, frown lines deepening on her forehead. ‘I fear I am talking rather too much.’

‘Not at all!’

‘You are frighteningly easy to talk to.’ She leans forward in her chair, eyes narrowing suspiciously beneath the drooped skin of the lids. ‘Have you done this sort of thing before?’

‘Never.’ Lorna can’t help but smile at the idea that she makes a habit of interviewing grand old dames in country-house drawing rooms.

‘Well, you’re a natural. We certainly didn’t have teachers like you in my day. My school days might have been rather more tolerable if we had.’ Mrs Alton smiles, but distantly. Her energy seems to be waning. ‘I trust you have enough information now.’

‘Um, not quite.’ If she doesn’t ask now … She steels herself, takes a deep breath, speaks as gently as she can. ‘What happened to Barney, Mrs Alton?’

‘Barney?’ Mrs Alton reaches for the decanter, refills her glass, a visible tremor in her grip. ‘Barney paid the price.’

‘The price?’ Lorna repeats, shocked. ‘The price for what?’

A soft knock at the door steals the answer. ‘Sorry to disturb you. It’s time for your pills, Mrs Alton.’ Dill walks over, carrying a tumbler of water. The scrappy terrier follows, claws tapping on the wood, trailing the smell of wet dog.

‘Petal!’ Mrs Alton’s face softens. She dips her finger in her sherry, and, not seeming to care if she loses it, lets the dog lick it off. ‘Good boy, Petal. Aren’t you my beautiful boy?’

‘You’ve missed your snooze today, Mrs Alton,’ says Dill, pulling a fistful of pills out of a grubby plastic freezer bag. She shoots Lorna a sweet smile. ‘That’s a first.’