Chapter 4
Mum wasn’t home when Bella got back from school, although she’d left a note on the table.
At supermarket. Back soon.
Bella checked the cupboards and managed to find one slightly crushed packet of salt and vinegar crisps. Hopefully Mum would bring some more snacks back with her.
This was the sort of moment where a mobile phone would come in really handy, she thought to herself. Everyone else seemed to have one and she was the only kid in the world whose parents thought she was too young. She was doing her A levels now, for God’s sake!
Of course, they all had them. Mum, Dad, Kitty. It was only she who was left out of the loop, having to borrow Mum’s phone to send a text, or use the landline in the hallway where everyone could hear her.
They’d argued about it ever since the French trip. ‘Mobile phones are expensive!’ her dad had said. ‘We’ve just spent two hundred quid sending you on holiday.’
‘But that was for school!’ she’d whined.
She’d keep at them. They’d have to give in eventually. If not, she’d have to save up for one, she supposed. Only at the rate she earned working in the bakery one Saturday a fortnight, it would probably take until she was a thousand years old.
The key scratched in the lock and she flung down her crisps, scattering a few but ignoring them, and went into the hallway to help Mum carry in the shopping, hoping to root through to see what she’d actually bought.
The dark feeling came seconds later when she stood in front of the unopened door. A kind of heaviness; a dread. Like in a horror movie when the idiot girl goes down to the deserted basement even when she knows there’s a murderer on the loose.
So as the door swung open to reveal not her mother’s face but Kitty’s – or a version of Kitty’s, a swollen, red-eyed, pale-skinned version whose eyes didn’t quite make contact with hers – she already knew something was very wrong.
‘Kitty,’ she said. ‘Where’s Mum?’