The Beloved Girls Read online

  ‘Charles,’ my father said, with an almost imperceptible nod back.

  ‘Simon. I see. Look, just on the phone to a man about a dog. Catch up with you later.’

  His gaze rested on me for a second then flickered away. Sylvia nodded, still smiling. ‘We’ll eat at about seven, OK, darling?’

  ‘Seven on the dot, please.’ He gave a minuscule acknowledgement to Daddy again, then shut the door.

  I thought this was rude, and turned to my father to see his reaction. He was watching the closed door, his expression seemingly blank.

  I wished we were still at home then, for a split second, in the comfortable mess of our front room, with the battered old blue sofa and the piles of records and books stacked on the coir matting floor, packets of biscuits, discarded homework and various inventions of Daddy’s scattered throughout the room. I wanted to feel safe. And yet I liked the spicy, warm smell of home cooking here, of woodsmoke, the thudding sounds of family. I wanted to explore.

  ‘Children!’ Sylvia called, with a note of hysteria. ‘Please come and say hello!’

  She had to repeat herself before, from around the corner of the wood-panelled hallway, three faces appeared.

  ‘These are the twins, this is Joss, and this is Kitty,’ said Sylvia. ‘And this is little Merry. She’s only nine.’

  Joss, tousle-haired, in an outsized rugby shirt, politely shook Daddy’s hand, and nodded at me. ‘Good evening.’ I tried not to show it but I was impressed; boys my age back in Greenford merely grunted. Merry jumped up and down, excited that we were here. She chewed a plait and hung on to her mum’s arm. Then Kitty stepped forward. I felt my father pushing me towards her, until we met under the pool of golden light.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘I’m Catherine Hunter,’ she said, formally. She was in fact quite shy; I didn’t know then. I saw only how very beautiful she was. ‘But you can call me Kitty.’

  ‘I’m Janey Lestrange,’ I said.

  She took my hand. I stared into her face, her dark gold hair spilling over her shoulders, her wide, generous mouth, her tall frame. ‘Come on,’ she said. She smiled, and I saw the gap in her crooked teeth, the kindness in her eyes. ‘We found a hedgehog this afternoon in the leaves, we nearly accidentally set him on fire. Rory’s locked up because he keeps trying to eat him. Do you want to come and see?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘He’s in the shed. I think he’s a he.’ She rummaged in her pocket, and took out a battered thin white paper bag. ‘Dad took me and Merry in to Minehead after he picked us up from school. He let us choose sweets. I saved one for you.’

  It was a Black Jack. I can still feel the almost wet waxiness of the paper, the anxious sliding of the nail to open up the tiny parcel, the delicious sweet-sugar rush of glucose and aniseed on my tongue.

  Sylvia came towards me, and put her arm round my shoulder. ‘Here,’ she said, and she handed me a little bear, from a side table. It was worn and puckered, but soft, the fur matted into rosettes, a bit like an old guinea pig. He had a battered, ragged blue ribbon round his neck, and a tiny gold pendant, engraved ‘Harrods’.

  ‘He was my bear when I was young –’

  ‘Sylvia,’ my father said, in a strange voice. ‘No. That’s very kind of you, but she doesn’t need it.’

  She reached as though to take it away but I very slightly moved back, and she shrugged, helplessly. So I was left holding the bear. He was a dull ginger brown, so soft, and smelled delicious, of lavender and sandalwood, like the house itself.

  ‘All right, then. Just for the stay,’ said Sylvia, tweaking his little ribbon and pendant, in a quick, birdlike, nervous gesture. ‘It’s just something for her to hold on to at night, Simon.’ She smiled brightly at me. ‘He’s called Wellington. Wellington Bear.’

  ‘Wellington?’

  The noise of the barking dog increased to a frenzy. I heard Charles shout, and the door opened again. ‘Sylvia, tell that dog to shut –’

  He paused, staring at me and Kitty.

  ‘Two beloved girls,’ said Sylvia. ‘Look at them, Charles, darling.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Daddy. ‘Think I left something in the car.’

  He went outside, banging the door in the still-pouring rain.

  I stayed where I was, feeling desperately awkward. Charles folded his arms, seemingly in no hurry this time. ‘Poor old Simon,’ he said, smiling. He nodded at me and Kitty, standing side by side. ‘ “Two, two, the beloved girls.” Perhaps one day, eh? When they’re fully grown. Now, I really do need to work.’

  He turned into his study and I heard a yowl, and a whack, and silence. ‘Now stay like that, damn you,’ he said, dragging the whimpering dog back out into the hall. ‘I’m not having him in here. Train him properly, he’s your dog, Sylvia. Otherwise I’ll get rid of him. I mean it. Beloved Girls. Hah. Yes, perhaps she’d do for the Collecting. It’s a good idea.’

  ‘Just a silly thing we do at the end of summer,’ Sylvia said to me, as Charles’s study door swung open again. She brushed away my hair and tucked the bear back into my arms. ‘Kitty can explain it later. Now, where’s Simon?’

  After a minute Daddy reappeared, his hands shunted deep into his pockets, bringing fresh air and scudding lemon-yellow leaves with him. ‘My apologies,’ he said. ‘Rather light-headed. Must be the long drive. Sorry, Sylvia. Just – it’s wonderful to see you, my dear.’

  And they stared at each other again, unsmiling, and I thought it couldn’t be true, whatever they said out loud.

  We were there for four perfect days, and when we drove away back to London I cried as though my heart would break.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you enjoyed yourself,’ said Daddy wryly, as I sobbed, staring out of the window.

  It had been magical. I thought of the dried, dead fern leaves the colour of flames that we had collected and I’d stored inside my Judy Blume book, the Wham! cassette that Kitty played nonstop and she and I and Merry danced to, to Joss’s huge annoyance, because he was really into New Romantics. The feel of Kitty’s soft hair against my cheek, trapped by my arms flung around her shoulders, as we hugged goodbye. ‘I’ll miss you so much,’ she’d whispered. And, tucked inside my backpack along with the ferns, Wellington Bear. ‘Don’t tell your father, but I want you to have him,’ Sylvia had told me quietly. ‘Charles hates him. He remembers him too, you see. Keep him safe, darling.’

  As I stood in the hall, slumping with tiredness and misery at the thought of going back to Greenford, to a house without a mother and to a life with a mother who didn’t love me the way other mothers did, this curious, hurried gesture meant something.

  But what meant the most was when Kitty appeared as I was being reluctantly pushed towards the car. My father was saying goodbye to Sylvia, whispering in her ear, as she gave him a tight, jerky hug.

  ‘Here,’ said Kitty, quietly. She held out her hand, a tight fist. ‘It’s for you. Please will you come back.’ It wasn’t a question.

  Slowly, she unfurled her hand. There lay a soft, dark-gold, dead honeybee. Its black wings were folded up, its stripes soft, the black segmented legs in angular shapes. The sting was slightly bent.

  She tipped it into my open palm. ‘Don’t worry, it won’t sting.’ Her small voice hissed in my ear: ‘It just means now that when you see one, it’ll remind you of here. And of me. So you’ll never forget us.’

  I didn’t go to Vanes again for over five years. In those intervening years I didn’t forget. I was reminded of her every time I saw a dead bee on a window sill or a pavement or in a dusty corner of our house, and I’d stop and nod. I needed no reminder though, because I thought about Kitty every day. How kind she was to me. How beautiful. Her house, her gilded life, her air of confidence, as if everything was easy. I wanted to be her. I wanted to be one of them. More than anything, before or since, God help me.

  Part One

  2018

  Chapter One

  When did it begin to fall a
part? Afterwards, she would look back to this point in time: the arrival back home, though she never knew precisely when the moment itself came, the tipping point, so that the weight of what she carried grew heavier and heavier, and the scales simply could not be balanced any more.

  ‘We should have just got the train,’ said Tom, moodily pulling his backpack out of the boot. ‘We’d have been home like, hours ago. Mum, next time, can you please make Dad take the train.’

  ‘It’s nearly midnight, FFS,’ said his older sister, Carys, flicking through her phone as she stood on the front doorstep, chewing gum. She jerked her head back, letting her hoodie slide away and revealing a pink forelock that Catherine, getting out of the car, mentally reminded herself would have to be dyed back to its original blonde before the school term started.

  ‘You know what Dad’s like about the Eurotunnel,’ she said, hauling her own bag smartly out of the car. ‘I can’t help you. You’re related to him by blood. Take it up with him.’

  Tom laughed. Their father, Davide, paused, the front-door key in one hand, and then turned to address his bedraggled, exhausted family.

  ‘The Eurotunnel,’ he proclaimed, raising the key as if it were a baton, ‘is a miracle of engineering. To drive one’s car onto a train, and to be conveyed by that train into France, is a great privilege. It is the longest –’

  ‘Submerged tunnel in the world,’ Carys said, without looking up from her phone. ‘I know, Dad. But there’s also the Eurostar. You get on this strange thing called a “train” and it takes you to, oh, I don’t know, about ten minutes from our own house without driving a carbon-polluting vehicle –’

  ‘Irrelevant,’ said Davide, inserting the key in the lock.

  ‘And you don’t have to – oh, I don’t know,’ said Tom, joining in with glee, ‘queue up for hours at Calais and dodge desperate refugees trying to cling on to your car and then drive for hours the other end in almost solid traffic.’

  ‘You cannot drive in solid traffic,’ said Davide, his handsome face splitting into a smile. ‘Haha! There. A fact.’

  ‘Oh my God. Mum,’ yelled Tom.

  Catherine just laughed. Across the road, their neighbour Judith was putting out her recycling. Catherine waved briefly at her.

  ‘Welcome back,’ Judith said. ‘Hope you had a wonderful time in France?’

  ‘We did, thanks,’ said Catherine.

  Judith stood up and Catherine saw her face wore a frown of concern. ‘And did you relax, Catherine? Have a proper break after that awful trial?’ She put her head on one side. ‘I hope you ignored the newspapers.’

  Catherine smiled.

  ‘I made her,’ said Davide, intervening. ‘I took her phone away, we went on long walks, we ate and we drank. Good Burgundy will solve everything.’

  ‘Oh, how nice,’ said Judith. She fluttered her eyelashes at Davide, who gave her a polite nod and turned to go inside.

  Stupid woman. Catherine smiled. ‘It was good to get away. It’s been fairly full on, as you say. Anyway – see you later.’ She raised her hand.

  Carys pushed past her father and went inside first, turning on the hall light. ‘I’m going out, I promised Lily I’d drop off the memory stick for her. Mum? Where shall I put the post?’

  ‘On the hall table, but Carys –’

  ‘OK. I need to grab an envelope for it from your study. Mum, there’s a letter for you, on the top. Mum?’

  But Catherine wasn’t listening. Pausing just a moment on the doorstep, she breathed in the evening air. It was that time of year when spring crept in on you suddenly, without warning, the scent of fresh-foul bulbs bursting through the wet, black earth. Paper-white narcissi and grape hyacinths dotted their tiny front garden. She could smell new growth, perhaps even the first mown grass from Mr Lebeniah’s neat rectangle, the spicy scent of box next door. Boscastle Road was quiet; a few peach-gold lights glowing in rooms along the black silhouetted street, with the not-quite-dark deep clear sky in relief behind it all.

  It was good to be home.

  The ice storm the papers had feverishly christened the ‘Beast from the East’ had lingered well into March, and Catherine’s usually brisk walk into chambers in Holborn had been hampered for weeks now with frost and slushy brown snow. It seemed they were always in the hallway, struggling into layers of clothing. It had been a rotten Easter, freezing, sleeting weather.

  But a few days into April the weather became deliciously warm. Waking up at her beloved in-laws’ house in Albi, in southern France, the sound of doves cooing in the dovecote in the garden, the fragile pale-blue skies carved up only with the occasional swallow heading back north, Catherine would check her phone, to see what it was like back in London, wondering why every morning she felt such dread at the prospect of going home again. Usually she loved spring. Not summer. Never summer.

  They’d been visiting Davide’s family for just over a week and she hoped that a new chapter could begin now after their return. A new school term, the end of a long, brutal winter. The end of the Doyle case.

  She shook her head, thoughts crowding in on her, the image of an inbox, filling up again. First, getting back into the swing of work, normal cases again. The prospect of visiting Grant Doyle in prison, not a welcome one. Then a visit to the care home. Then getting Carys to do some work for her exams.

  ‘Catherine,’ said Davide, as their daughter stomped upstairs. ‘Come inside, my love. Pour me a drink. I will bring in the rest of the bags from the car.’

  ‘It’s all done,’ said Catherine, briefly, smiling at him. She stepped over the threshold, inside the house, inhaling the old smell of home. Furniture polish and wood. The faintest scent of spicy sandalwood from a carved box on the mantelpiece in the sitting room, bought during their twentieth-anniversary trip to Marrakech.

  ‘You confound me, woman,’ said Davide. He gave her a small kiss. ‘Are you glad to be back?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Are you glad we went away?’

  ‘Yes. Very.’

  He stroked her hair, his dark eyes holding hers. ‘Well, I am glad.’

  She caught hold of him for a moment. ‘Couldn’t we – just move to Albi, Davide? Wouldn’t it be nice?’ He laughed, faintly uneasy.

  ‘My love, live in the same place as my parents? And Sandrine? I don’t think so. What has brought this on?’

  ‘The – being back in it all.’ She let her shoulders slump. ‘What’s to come. Oh, I’m just being silly.’

  ‘No, you have holiday withdrawal.’ He kissed her forehead. ‘We discussed, didn’t we, the possibility of the weekend break, Catrine.’

  She edged away from him, and took off her shoes. ‘Yes . . . but –’

  And suddenly from upstairs there came a scream. ‘What the – oh fuck. Mum! Oh fuck. Someone’s broken in! They’ve been in your study!’

  Catherine and Davide raced up the stairs to the study, a tiny room at the back of the house in between floors. Carys was standing just inside, her face white.

  ‘The door was locked. I wanted an envelope so I unlocked it.’ She was gabbling. ‘There’s glass all over the roof.’

  ‘My God.’ Davide pushed his daughter aside. ‘Have they been anywhere – else?’

  ‘They must have come in and gone out through the window. The study was locked, Dad. I unlocked it. They couldn’t have got to the rest of the house.’

  ‘They smashed the window?’ Davide said, gazing round. ‘Oh no.’

  Every surface was covered with papers. Years of work, diaries, memos. Someone had sliced into box files and taken them out. Whilst most of the glass was on the roof outside, a couple of pieces of glass rested on the window sill, glinting in the evening light. A glossy magazine, the pages torn out, was scattered on the floor. One page was scrunched up into a ball, resting on the keyboard.

  Catherine stared, her hands pressed to her mouth.

  ‘Let me –’ Carys said, moving towards the piles of handwritten documents, the balled-up piece of paper.
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  ‘No,’ Catherine said, sharply. ‘There’ll be glass. Get away, darling.’

  ‘Almost all the glass is outside actually, Mum. On the flat roof,’ Carys said.

  ‘Have they – been anywhere else?’

  Davide was looking through the rest of the house, the top floor, the kitchen. ‘I don’t see anything,’ he called up to her, after a minute. ‘I’m phoning the police.’

  ‘No –’ Catherine called down. ‘No, please don’t.’

  ‘But of course, Catherine. They climbed in –’

  Catherine put her hand on the desk, to steady herself. ‘Darling, do please get out of the way. Just in case.’

  But Carys bent down and started picking books and papers and stationery off the floor. ‘I’m going to get a dustpan from downstairs,’ she said, practically.

  ‘Davide. Please. Please don’t call them,’ Catherine said. ‘I mean it.’

  Her husband appeared on the landing, the phone in his hand, and stared at her in surprise. ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘I know who it was.’

  ‘What?’

  Tom was at the bottom of the stairs. They were all watching her, the post-holiday bonhomie gone. She felt it, the ground shifting beneath her.

  She thought of the article in the newspaper, found on the ferry back. How she had only seen it because she’d turned the page to avoid reading about Grant Doyle.

  ‘It’s to do with Grant. It’s his sister. Or some friend. I know it is.’

  ‘What?’ said Tom.

  ‘Catrine. Why?’

  ‘He’s eighteen and he’s in prison, probably for most of the rest of his life,’ said Catherine. ‘And he hates me. He sent some mate of his round to do it. Look. With the kitchen extension roof you can see how they’d get in. They climbed the wall on the street onto the roof and then it’s easy.’ She was still staring round the room.

  ‘Look what they did, though.’

  Catherine paused, stepping out of the moment, as she had taught herself to do using one of those mindfulness apps. She breathed deeply. They mustn’t see how exposed she was. She gestured to the documents, the bundles of papers, scattered on the floor. ‘I know. I – maybe we should call the police. But I’d just rather not. Look. I’m going to see him soon. I’ll talk to him.’