Chapter 23
Istare at the word BITCH, screaming at me from the wall of my own house.
An invisible force lifts my hand to touch it: the paint is dry. I run it across the entire breadth of the red rage. Dry and hardened in the places where so much was applied, it’s left a ridge or a bump. I bend to check that the dripping is a suspended animation. It is.
I don’t think this was done today. I think this happened last night.
I can see how Garda Murphy would’ve missed it.
She was here after dark. There’s no working light in this room, but with the door pushed all the way in, she would’ve seen enough to see that it was empty – not this, hiding in the shadows behind the door.
I didn’t see it either, this morning, when I went to go downstairs.
It was only now, approaching from the opposite direction – and with the benefit of daylight – that I spotted it.
And there’s nothing else to see. No sticky paint pot. No discarded, bloody brush. No evidence at all except the letters themselves. And now that I’m looking for it, only the faintest smell of fresh paint.
All the stories I’ve been telling myself – that everything that’s gone on here has just been an ill-mannered house-hunter, or a disproportionately disgruntled one, or a wayward member of the Murder House Club – can’t survive this.
Bitch is angry. Targeted. Personal.
With shaking fingers, I take out my phone and search for Jason’s Instagram account. As before, I can only see the first couple of rows of photos. They’re the same ones I saw the first time I did this.
Except for the latest one.
It’s a picture of a large, glossy sign in an overly lit corridor with a shiny floor. Fáilte go dtí Aerfort Bhaile átha Cliath, in large green letters.
Welcome to Dublin Airport, in Irish.
He’s back.
He’s here.
My stomach churns. When a WhatsApp notification appears on screen I seize on it, desperate for something small and inconsequential I can focus on, cling to.
One new message in the Dundrummed group: 3 Delaney Row has shared a photo.
I tap to open it.
And then I can’t believe my eyes.
Annalise has posted a photo of my kitchen. Taken last night, before I knew she was there, because it’s a view she could only have captured standing with her back against the side wall.
It’s of the whole room. The whole mess.
The caption reads Was this you? Too far! We need to talk.
Does she seriously think that I did that? Trashed my own kitchen? What possible reason would I have? And what makes her think it’s OK to accuse me in a public forum? I replay our conversation yesterday, searching for something she could have misconstrued, but find nothing.
Unless by you she means the group, but one hundred and fifty people didn’t come in here and do this either.
Or she means someone within the group.
I’m staring at the words, perplexed, trying to make them make sense, when they disappear.
I think I’ve done it with my trembling fingers until—
This message was deleted.
Because she sent it by mistake.
She meant to send it privately, to the person who let themselves into my house with a key, trashed my kitchen and left my bathroom mirror in smithereens. Who painted BITCH in five-foot letters on my bedroom wall.
Realization dawns with a new, cold horror: Annalise knows who did it.
A typing bubble appears. JOHN QUINN posts @3DelaneyRow wrong group I think?
?? Within seconds, three other people have reacted to this with laughing emojis.
Another message, this one from ALISON T: What did I miss?
?? She follows this up with a complaint about the gym pumping dance music out its window again and a promise that she’s going to send another letter to the council.
DEE DEE replies that she’s wasting her time and then MO AZIZ replies that it’s worth sending an email regardless.
I want to scream at these people to shut the fuck up.
I want to type a message in all caps telling Annalise that I saw it. Fleetingly, I consider going outside and banging on her door.
Was this you? Too far! We need to talk.
Too far from what?
From what they were supposed to do. From what was agreed.
From the plan.
The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle spin into place and, for the first time, show me the whole picture.
Why would Jason go to the trouble and expense of getting me to sign an agreement saying we’d never interfere with each other’s lives ever again if he was planning to come here and do this?
That doesn’t make sense. And just because he’s back doesn’t mean it’s connected to me.
He probably visits all the time. It’s just a coincidence.
But the intruders. Sophie ringing the guards to tell them I was squatting. BITCH, screamed at me in red. I pray the house is happy now, at long last! Even the human-shaped stain, conveniently hiding under loose carpet in this very room, inches from where I’m standing right now.
It was all part of their plan.
To force me out of this house. To get me to sell it, after all.
That does make sense. And it means I don’t have to be afraid any more. Now, I only have to be what I already am.
Extremely fucking angry.
When I enter Harrington Properties, I find Deirdre standing inside the window, slipping a property listing into her lighted display.
Today, the tailored trousers are a rich burgundy, the button-down is white and the silk scarf has a polka-dot pattern.
Glossy red nails, check. Black-framed glasses, check.
Pained expression at the sight of me in her office, check, check, check.
‘I figured it out,’ I say. ‘I know what’s going on.’
‘Oh thank God,’ she deadpans.
‘Can we talk privately?’
‘If we must.’
Only one of her haircuts is in the office today, eyeing me like I’m a wild animal and he’s not sure who to call to report my presence but he knows he should call someone before I start wrecking the place. When Deirdre shakes her head at him, he visibly relaxes.
Clearly, I’ve made a lasting impression.
We go into her office and sit down.
‘It’s a campaign,’ I say.
She sighs. ‘All right, I’ll bite. What is?’
‘All of this. Everything that’s been going on.’
‘Which is what?’
I recap my eventful seventy hours in my new home.
‘Feck it,’ she says when I’m done. ‘Maybe that place is cursed.’
‘I think Sophie is behind it. And that Annalise, the woman who lives in number three, is helping her. We know Sophie wanted to bid on the house and was pissed off when she couldn’t.
Her brother told me that one of your friends out there’ – I jerk a thumb over my shoulder – ‘confirmed to Sophie that the house hadn’t sold.
She looks up the Land Registry, because whoever was the last owner is still the owner now, right?
And that’s me. So now she has my name. And if you’re the type of person who runs a search like that on your new neighbour, there’s no way you’re not also the kind of person who’d immediately google me and find out who I am. ’
‘You mean …?’ Deirdre gives me a pointed look.
She’s never actually said anything to me about my conviction, but I’ve always assumed she’s known about it from the get-go.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I share my name with someone in the States who, helpfully, has a much bigger internet-footprint than me, but still. If you dug deep enough for long enough, you’d find something.
All the news reports, for starters.’ I feel sick just thinking about Sophie’s face, lit by the blue glow of a computer screen, as she reads the headlines with relish.
‘And Sophie would definitely dig. Do you know she called the guards on me, to tell them she suspected I was squatting?’
‘Actually, I do,’ Deirdre says, grimacing. ‘A Garda Murphy called me this morning asking about you. Well, asking about the house. She wanted to know if it had sold recently and I said no, and if that meant the owner listed on the Land Registry was the current one. Obviously I had to say yes.’
So Murphy knows who I am.
In a weird way, it’s a relief. The worst has already happened.
And Sophie might have saved me a trip to the garda station.
‘She hasn’t called you?’ Deirdre asks.
‘Who?’
‘The guard. Murphy.’
‘She can’t. She doesn’t have my number.’
‘Ah …’ Deirdre looks guilty. ‘She does, actually.’
‘What?’
‘She asked me for it. I had to give it to her.’
‘What happened to all your GR … PD … R thing?’
‘GDPR,’ Deirdre corrects. Then she frowns. ‘Actually, I don’t know about that. Maybe I shouldn’t have given it to her.’
I roll my eyes. ‘Bit late now.’
‘But why?’ Deirdre says then. ‘Why would Sophie do this? There’s being annoyed that you lost out on a property, and then there’s being mildly psychotic.’
‘Honestly? I think because I was in prison. I think she told Annalise what she found out, and that I was hiding it, that I’d given them a false name—’
‘Hang on, hang on. Hang on. You did what?’
I blush. ‘Ah, yeah. I kind of told them my name was Eleanor. Ellie.’
Deirdre shakes her head. ‘Sorry, has someone put hallucinogens in the water supply around here this week or what? Why?’
‘Because I didn’t want them to know who I really am.’
‘But your name is on the Land Registry.’
‘I know that now.’ I pause to take a breath.
‘So, look. I think Sophie tells Annalise that a convicted criminal has moved into the terrace – a lying one – and now they both have a vested interest in getting me out. Sophie wants the house and no one wants to live near someone like me. So they hatch a plan. To break in, try to frighten me, make a mess.’ I wonder now if Alex is involved.
He would have to be, wouldn’t he? But I don’t want to think about him being in on it too, so I push the thought away.
‘Annalise sends me a weird message about my house being happy at long last, so I’ll start wondering.
You know, I think they might even have painted a stain in the shape of a person on the bedroom floorboards.
The Murder House Club guys told me that that’s a thing. People do it. As a prank.’