The locked attic, p.1
The Locked Attic, page 1
Praise for The Locked Attic
‘I’m a big fan of B P Walter. You should be, too … his novels are charged with darkness and plotted with watchmaker precision. And The Locked Attic is his sneakiest, snakiest thriller to date – a mind game in which the rules are ever-shifting’
A. J. FINN
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‘Genuinely compelling domestic noir’
CARA HUNTER
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‘Sinister and chilling, clever and gripping. The Locked Attic is the kind of just-one-more-page thriller that B P Walter is justly celebrated for’
CHRIS WHITAKER
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‘The Locked Attic is such an achievement. I was intrigued all the way and loved how it all came together’
SUSAN LEWIS
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‘The most compulsively readable, blistering, addictive mystery I’ve read all year’
GREG BUCHANAN
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‘I was completely hooked. Absolutely addictive’
JOHN MARRS
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‘An unusual book which is part thriller, part coming of age… I raced through this’
CATHERINE COOPER
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‘Sharp, intelligent and compelling, this dark thriller will captivate you from the very first page’
LESLEY KARA
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‘Hooks you from page one and never lets go. Unputdownable’
MELANIE BLAKE
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‘I flew through The Locked Attic. It is a real page turner’
PATRICIA GIBNEY
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‘Cleverly written with lots of twists I never expected’
HELEN PHIFER
‘Sinister, expertly plotted and extremely moreish’
CAROLINE CORCORAN
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‘A dark and totally addictive read’
S.E. LYNES
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‘Shifting time frames and multiple narrations deliver a
deliciously layered story about family secrets and tragic
loss… A riveting read’
WENDY WALKER
‘A masterful tale of lies, secrets and obsession’
GUY MORPUSS
‘Thoroughly engrossing. I had NO idea where the twists and turns were going to take me’
LIZZY BARBER
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‘A complete thrill ride from the first page until the last… The Locked Attic will be your new obsession’
PAMELA CRANE
‘Tense, gripping, and heartbreaking. And it comes with a shocking twist you’ll never see coming’
TIM GLISTER
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‘Perpetually twisting and genuinely unputdownable, The Locked Attic is an up-all-night powerhouse of a novel’
LAURIE ELIZABETH FLYNN
‘Wow! The Locked Attic completely sucked me in’
PHILIPPA EAST
The Locked Attic
B P Walter
One More Chapter
a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2022
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Copyright © B P Walter 2022
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Cover design by Lucy Bennett © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2022
Cover photograph © Richard Nixon / Arcangel Images
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B P Walter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
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Source ISBN: 9780008446123
Ebook Edition © November 2022 ISBN: 9780008446116
Version: 2022-10-21
Contents
Stephanie
1. Stephanie
2. Stephanie
3. Stephanie
4. Stephanie
5. Stephanie
6. Danny
7. Stephanie
8. Stephanie
9. Stephanie
10. Danny
11. Stephanie
12. Stephanie
13. Stephanie
14. Stephanie
15. Stephanie
16. Stephanie
17. Danny
18. Stephanie
19. Danny
20. Stephanie
21. Stephanie
22. Danny
23. Stephanie
24. Stephanie
25. Stephanie
26. Stephanie
27. Stephanie
28. Stephanie
29. Stephanie
30. Stephanie
31. Stephanie
32. Stephanie
33. Stephanie
Danny
Acknowledgments
Thank you for reading…
About the Author
Also by B P Walter
Credits
Subscribe to the OMC Newsletter
About the Publisher
For my wonderful agent Joanna and the amazing team at Hardman & Swainson
The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
— G. K. Chesterton
Stephanie
Now
I am in hospital. Confused, in pain, broken.
Desperately, I try to find something about my situation that might calm me, and try to force my brain to focus on the ambient sound of nurses hurrying around and patients demanding food and medication – continuous white noise that’s distracting, yes, but not exactly soothing.
Sinister shapes and sounds move through my mind, like a shifting fog, sometimes obscuring, sometimes revealing. I can remember snatches of what happened. Broken fragments that are never quite properly defined. It’s like I’m behind a wall of glass of ever varying density and transparency.
How did I end up here?
I try to take myself back to the moment right before the pain thudded through my body. Small details start to take hold. Fingernails scratching on wood. Some sort of scrabbling. Trying to pull myself up. Hunting for something. Searching for something.
I’m pulled away from my thoughts by a kind-sounding nurse, who asks me if I’m up to taking a sip of water. I do my best, but my throat feels horribly dry and there’s a strange taste – something acidic, perhaps. Like orange juice past its prime. When I mention this to the nurse, she says it’s quite normal – a mixture of the shock and the pain meds. I ask if she knows what happened to me, and she nods and says, ‘Yes, I heard, dear, when you were brought in yesterday.’
I frown, causing a sore tugging sensation to spread across my forehead. ‘Yesterday? I’ve been here…’
‘You were kept overnight, dear, for monitoring. What a horrible thing to happen, especially… well, with everything that’s been going on...’
I notice her eyes flick over to the window, but I don’t trust myself to move enough to follow her gaze properly. She seems to think I’d know what she’s talking about. That I’d have the same details to hand as her. In my disoriented state, that’s the thing that seems the most incongruous right at that moment. Absurdly, my mind flicks to a scene in a movie – The Matrix, I think – of a man waking up in a pod filled with liquid, and he’s one of thousands in a strange world he doesn’t recognise. His whole sense of what’s real and what’s inside his head has been turned upside down. Like I’ve been shown two images in a spot-the-difference game, only I can’t even tell what’s the same. It makes me feel powerless.
But as I lie here, those vague memories start to take shape. Edges start to appear. Clarity begins to emerge. And the image of a house arrives, clear and fully formed at the front of my mind.
The Franklins’ house.
54 Oak Tree Close.
I remember what my son said, the day he first visited that place. ‘Something’s not quite right.’ It sent a prickle down the back of my neck at the time, and it does so again now. It’s all to do with that house. The things that happened there. What’s hidden in the attic.
I reach for another sip of water and realise my hands have started to shake.
One
Stephanie
Seven months before the explosion
It’s hard to really know where this all started.
When I first met my husband? When we had our boy? When we moved to Oak Tree Close? They all vaguely feel like beginnings in some way. But I think the day that properly set the wheels in motion was the late October night I picked up my sixteen-year-old son Danny from his band practice at his mate Scotty s. The band practice had actually become a sort of party to celebrate Scotty’s seventeenth birthday, which was officially the following week, but Danny would be in America then and I think a few of the others couldn’t make it. So the party was tacked on to the end of their normal Friday night band practice. My husband had dropped him off, and even though he said he didn’t mind going back to get him, I could tell he didn’t want to venture out in the cold again. So I said I’d go.
I hadn’t really wanted Danny to go to the party, but Pete said it was harsh to make the boy miss out just because we were going away the next day. ‘He won’t be able to sleep. He’ll be excited anyway, so he might as well be hanging out with his friends.’ I told him teenagers grow out of that so-excited-I-can’t-sleep routine before a holiday, and besides, him being awake and out partying means we have to be awake – something that, at the age of sixteen, he probably hadn’t quite clocked.
The temperature was falling fast and the light in the car had gone off, making the street lamps along the road seem even brighter, glowing in a thin mist that was starting to spread through the night air. I noticed the house to my left had Halloween decorations strung through the trees – warm-white fairy lights intertwined with a sequence of pumpkins and fake orange leaves. They’d probably just remove the pumpkins once the 31st had passed; that way they’d already have their Christmas lights up, prepped and ready. They put them up early around here, probably because so many of the families jetted off to their holiday homes in December. We’d never done that – a proper British Christmas was what Pete liked and, over the years, I’d grown to like it too. It had never been that much fun with my parents, but I’d got into the swing of things when I had kids of my own. Watching Danny tear open his presents really had been that special kind of magic so many parents talk about, especially when he was younger.
I was drawn out of my seasonal nostalgia by a noise from over near Scotty’s house. The front door had opened and two figures had started walking along the path through the front garden and over towards me.
‘Hi, boys,’ I said, as Danny and Jonathan got in. I’d completely forgotten we were giving Danny’s bandmate and schoolfriend Jonathan Franklin a lift, although since he lived practically opposite us it didn’t really make much of a difference. I was used to ferrying him about, and at least the Franklins often returned the favour.
‘Good party?’ I asked, when neither of them replied to my cheery greeting. I started driving, wondering what on earth was going on. I usually got a ‘Hiya’ at the very least from Danny, and Jonathan wasn’t a rude, unfriendly boy, although he could be a little shy.
There was something else different too, something I realised as I manoeuvred the car out of the tight cul-de-sac and onto Elm Tree Road, which was just one of the many rabbit-warren-like streets that made up our neighbourhood. Danny was in the front with me, his guitar clutched between his legs. He didn’t usually do this, not when we had Jonathan in the car. They’d always sit in the back and talk about things – trivial stuff, like the fact Scotty always played his guitar slightly flat, or something that had happened in maths class and why Mr Redmond was ‘such a prick’. But nothing was said at all. Silent and separated, they just sat as I drove, an awkward tension seeming to radiate off both of them.
‘Is everything OK?’ I asked, and Danny finally stirred, jerking his head towards me as if he’d only just realised I was there. ‘Oh fine, yeah… just tired.’
He wasn’t just tired. I knew something was wrong. But it didn’t look like he was going to elaborate, not while Jonathan was in the car. Nor did he seem keen to hang around when we got home, after his friend had sloped off to his own house over the road. He just disappeared upstairs, swiftly followed by his father, asking if he had everything packed for the flight tomorrow.
And that was that.
He behaved relatively normally the next day, was generally fine in America, if a tad quiet, while we stayed with Pete’s brother. It was only once we returned and the days started to edge into winter that that odd night in the car with the two boys came back into my mind. And everything went spinning off in another direction. A direction that both changed my world and obliterated it.
Two
Stephanie
The day of the explosion
I was having a dream when the first explosion occurred. Something about my wedding day, but we couldn’t find any flowers – someone had stolen them from the church, and then we ended up finding them in a Tesco bag-for-life out in the graveyard, swimming in blood. It was all rather horrible, especially when the vicar, who was the spitting image of Frank Sinatra, poured gasoline onto them, cackling as he did it, and created a mini blaze amongst the gravestones. Stranger still, my mother was there, looking delighted, which was a rarity in itself, and stood behind the burning flowers singing ‘We Three Kings’, the song she’d sung to me as a child, no matter what time of year it was. Desperate to take hold of her, I reached out my hand, stretching, trying to reach her.
But the explosion put an end to all that.
I was pulled into reality in an instant, flailing around in my duvet, looking about me, unsure where the noise was coming from. It was so loud, and deep, with a heavy bass resonance so strong it was almost as if I could still feel it vibrating within me.
I felt both alert and disorientated as I scrabbled around on the bedside table for my phone. I picked it up and looked at the time. 6.45am. I scrolled through the in-built news app, then BBC News, but couldn’t find any reports. I opened up Twitter and typed in Kent and Bang. Someone called CassieLovesZayn had tweeted:
OMFG what the fuck was that? MASSIVE bang. Anyone else in Hangway in Kent hear it?
A guy simply called Gavin had replied:
Yeah, love. Massive. Definitely a bomb.
Although I wasn’t any more of an expert than Gavin, I had to agree with him – a noise that loud certainly sounded like a bomb blast, or at least what I’d imagine one to sound like. But there wasn’t anywhere around here someone would want to attack. We weren’t near any tourist landmarks that would result in mass fatalities. I was continuing to scroll when I saw a woman named LexieStarSigns had tweeted:
The power station has gone up, it’s on fire! I can see it from my house!
I rushed to the balcony. The trees were too high for me to see much, but there was something there that wasn’t usually part of my morning view. A dark, ominous layer, getting larger, blossoming and growing and starting to fill the sky above the trees and the woodland my house backed onto.
