Chapter 33
THIRTY-THREE
Over the next couple of days, after the mercy of the weekend, Beatrice found herself bursting into tears at the slightest thing: when Slate gave her a picture he’d drawn of her, with long yellow hair, a bright red smile and hearts next to the wonky BIBI he had written underneath; when coffee spurted out of the sides of the cafetière as she was pushing down the plunger, scalding her hand; when Neil rang to check in and ask if she was okay.
‘You’ve had a shock,’ Frances, who had taken a rare two days off work to spend with Parker, told her. ‘Me too. I haven’t been able to sleep at all since it happened – I keep getting up and creeping in to check on them. And my sugar cravings are off the scale.’
Beatrice had found the opposite – whenever she tried to eat, she felt her throat closing, as if her body was echoing what Parker’s had done when she’d been unable to breathe.
‘I’ll be okay,’ she said. ‘You’re right, it was a shock. But it’s my job to deal with things like that, right?’
‘And you were marvellous. Peter and I will never, ever be able to thank you enough. You saved her life.’ Frances lowered her voice so that Parker, contentedly bashing wooden pans in her play kitchen, couldn’t hear.
‘Don’t.’ Beatrice felt a fresh surge of the terror she’d felt that night. ‘She’d have been fine. It was only croup.’
She pulled a tissue out of the box on the kitchen island and dabbed her eyes.
‘Oh, honey.’ Frances laid a comforting hand on her arm. ‘Look – why don’t you take the afternoon off? Get some rest. Have a break.’
‘But what will the kids do this afternoon?’
Frances laughed. ‘I will take care of that, of course. I don’t know how we managed without you – even before I went back to work, the place was always chaos and the kids were feral. But I am their mother – I reckon I can cope without you for one afternoon.’
Reluctantly, Beatrice agreed. Frances was right – she needed to rest. She felt hollowed out with tiredness, but at the same time brimming with emotion, seesawing between tenderness and anger with such speed that she could barely put a name to her feelings from one minute to the next.
‘If you take them out, Slate’ll need his raincoat and I’m not sure where it is. I may have put it in the wash. And Parker’s decided she doesn’t like peas with her mac and cheese any more.’
‘Beatrice.’ Frances smiled, but there was a hint of steel in her eyes. ‘I’ll be fine.’
Beatrice felt herself flushing, tears prickling her eyes yet again. ‘Sure. Great. Thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Chastened, feeling as if her employer had segued from praising her to telling her off in the space of seconds, Beatrice left.
When she arrived back at Damask Square, the house was deserted. Livvie would be at work. Luke must have been out on some errand. And Orla – who knew? It would have been the perfect opportunity to do some more investigating, but Beatrice didn’t have the energy.
She let herself into her room, took off her clothes, lay down in bed and fell asleep in seconds.
It was dark when she woke up and the house was as silent as it had been when she’d arrived home. She could see a full moon gleaming through the leaves of the birch tree outside her window; a glance at her watch told her it was two in the morning. She’d slept for twelve hours straight, and now she was wide awake, her mind humming with alertness.
She pulled on her pyjamas and thrust her feet into her sneakers, then sat for a few moments on the bed, listening keenly but hearing nothing. Then she stood up, picked up her torch and stole to the bathroom. She peed as silently as she could and crept downstairs, where she waited in the kitchen for a full five minutes, watching and listening.
She could hear the swish of the occasional car on the street outside. A moth, lured indoors by the light earlier, bashed against a windowpane somewhere. But no one stirred – it was so quiet Beatrice could hear her own breathing.
For a moment, she allowed herself to imagine that she lived here on her own – that the house was hers and hers alone. How beautiful she could make it! She’d put in a new kitchen and an en-suite bathroom with a power shower. She’d have her studio up on the top floor, where the light would be perfect. She’d have a little wrought-iron table and chairs out in the garden, and friends would come and sip rosé with her.
This house – she could see why Orla loved it. She could imagine loving it too. She felt in her bones that it partly belonged to her – or she belonged to it.
Then she heard movement and almost jumped out of her skin. But it was only Maud padding downstairs, her eyes huge and luminous when Beatrice shone the beam of her torch on her face.
As ever the cat regarded her with wariness. She knew that Beatrice wouldn’t feed her like Orla did, fuss her like Livvie did, or engage her in exciting games with discarded cable ties like Luke did.
Now, though, Beatrice had other plans for her. She had things to do, and Maud could help.
‘Come on,’ Beatrice whispered. ‘We’re going in.’
She stepped out of the kitchen and tiptoed to the door beneath the stairs that led down to the cellar. Since she’d discovered it, it had been in the back of her mind – something to be investigated, but not now. Later, when there was an opportunity.
And this was that opportunity.
She lifted the latch and eased the door open. The same breath of cool air she’d felt when she’d first noticed it greeted her now, along with the smell of cold dust and old things.
Through the opening, Beatrice could see a steep, narrow flight of bowed wooden stairs leading downwards.
She’d expected to have to manhandle the cat down with her, but that wasn’t necessary. Maud approached the gap quite readily, her tail low and her whiskers bristling. She placed a paw on the top step, then another, then began to walk downwards, switching to bunny-hops as she neared the bottom.
‘Good girl,’ Beatrice whispered. ‘Now don’t let any rats near me, okay?’
She herself descended the stairs backwards, like a ladder. Each step was too shallow to fit the full length of her foot and worn so smooth with time that the wood was as slippery as glass. The air was cool and smelled horrible – musty and stale and just the way Beatrice imagined a place where rats lived would smell. The floor was flagstones, smooth but uneven beneath her feet, and the floorboards above just higher than her head.
A cobweb brushed her face and she suppressed a scream, forcing herself to take a steadying breath of the dank air and shining her torch cautiously around.
The space was huge – way larger than she’d expected. Probably, when the house had been built, it had been intended to store wine and perhaps even fresh meat and cheese, rather than coal. The walls were brick, gleaming damply in the beam of her torch.
Piled against one wall, Beatrice saw a stack of plastic tea crates, their sides black, their lids a brighter colour – orange or yellow; she wasn’t able to tell in the pallid torchlight. She could no longer see the cat, who had padded off somewhere into the gloom.
She approached the stack of crates, holding her torch between her teeth, and reached for the top one. The plastic was rough beneath her fingers, embossed with an even, nubbly texture. The lid was made up of two halves, interlocking at the centre like fingers.
Carefully, she prised them apart and opened them. At once, she was met with a different smell – the smell of paint. Not the emulsion Luke used on the walls, which was so familiar to her now she barely noticed it when she stepped into the house, but oil paint, like an artist would use.
So Orla did paint, after all – it wasn’t just talk.
The crate was stacked with canvases and sheets of cartridge paper that looked like they’d been torn from a pad, their edges serrated from the spiral binding. She leafed through them and picked one out at random, holding it up to the light of her torch.
She could see the outline of a girl’s face, fine-boned and wide-eyed, dark hair falling to her shoulders, but the light was too bad for her to make out much more. Frustrated, she replaced the page and took out another, seeing the same face, this time painted in watercolour, smiling. The girl’s cheeks were perhaps a little fuller, the hair shorter, the collar that framed her face rounded like a child’s blouse. But it wasn’t the identity of the sitter that caught Beatrice’s eye – it was the style of the work.
There was real skill in the little painting. The areas where blank paper showed to indicate highlights were perfectly placed. The colour was intense in the background, yet as smooth as rose petals on the skin of the girl’s face. Her eyes seemed to meet Beatrice’s as she looked at them, as if she was saying, Oh, it’s you. Here I am, too.
Beatrice would have bet her bottom dollar that it had been painted by the same artist whose landscape of Clonmara hung on the landing.
Then she heard a sound that made her drop the portrait to the floor. A scraping scurrying, like small, clawed legs, and then a high-pitched squeal.
Beatrice felt perspiration break out all over her body and adrenaline galvanising her. She didn’t pause to close the crate – she simply bolted, her feet slipping on the damp floor, and clambered up the stairs on all fours, emerging gasping into the clear air of the ground floor.
Then she turned and pulled the door closed behind her, barely caring if it made a noise.
She stood in the silence, gasping and terrified. Only when her breath had settled back to normal did she creep back upstairs, shutting herself away in her bedroom again.