“I’m as strong and as smart as any of you. All I ever wanted was for you to acknowledge me as part of the family,” Angel said, her face the colour of molten lead.

  Tapping his foot, Scott itched in his seat. It was partly down to his withdrawal, but mainly it was the Maguires. They were an irritant, to each other and to him. Scott had also been pitched against his sibling, but it was to his betterment, not his destruction. Angel was disintegrating and he guessed her sister hadn’t fared much better.

  “And where did you say Hope was?” Scott asked.

  Angel ignored the question. Her eyes were glued to Eleanor’s face. “You climbed out of the pond. You left me in the water.”

  Eleanor twirled gnarled fingers through her guard dog’s hair. The Alsatian’s lip curled in pleasure.

  Angel moved to Scott’s shoulder, her hand brushing his neck. “Well, now I have someone in my life who won’t leave me.”

  Scott tried not to tense. There was a sweet scent to Angel that was too strong, as if she had eaten too many boiled sweets and the sucrose was seeping from her skin.

  Scott took her hand and kissed it.

  “We’re in this together,” he said, catching the cynicism in Eleanor’s face, “and I won’t let anyone get in our way.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  There was a missed call from Bronson, but when Daniel tried to call him back, it went to voicemail and he left a message.

  “Scott is working for the Maguires. You’re in danger. Get to Five Oaks as soon as you can.”

  Disconnecting, Daniel slowed his approach along the driveway. The doors to Five Oaks were open when he’d left strict instructions to keep them closed. The garden appeared empty and there was no one by the jetty.

  Daniel stepped into the great hallway, closing the doors with a gentle click. He listened to his home, hearing it rasp, but there were no other signs of life.

  “Is anybody here?” he shouted, his voice bouncing off the walls.

  Jogging up the wooden staircase, Daniel pivoted around the top post and down the landing to Eisha’s room. Her bed was made. Her flat screen television was off. He checked her wardrobe and all her clothes were there. Her bedroom was undisturbed, except for the dolls. They lay on the floor, like the re-enactment of a deadly battlefield.

  “Eisha?” Daniel shouted along the landing. “Eisha?”

  Daniel didn’t know where to go. He marched to the guest room where Lily and Panwar were staying. The door screeched as he entered. It wasn’t a room he visited often. There was a king size bed and a duvet without a cover. An oil painting of a dark forest hung lopsided on the wall, neighbour to a dirty mirror. Someone had written Clean Me on its surface. Lily’s bag was by a chest of drawers untouched. There was nothing of Panwar’s clothing, but his laptop was on a desk in the corner, the on light pulsing red.

  Daniel opened the computer and the screen glowed to life, populated with black and white images. They were grainy and shot from odd angles. He examined each one, his brow knitting together. The first few were of rooms that looked vaguely familiar. The next were taken outside. There was a lake and an island. There was a gravelled driveway with Victorian lampposts. Daniel saw his van parked by the front of the house.

  He examined the last image and saw Eisha in her abandoned play area, kneeling by the slide. In the background, the swings wafted in the breeze. These weren’t pictures, Daniel realised. This was live action captured on camera. Five Oaks was under surveillance.

  Daniel’s eyes crawled over the image of his daughter. Now that he knew what he was looking at, he recognised swaying trees and birds flitting by as black dots on a grey sky. And there was something else; something lurking next to his daughter.

  Stumbling over his panicked feet, Daniel rushed out of the room, thundering down the stairs to the garden outside.

  Eisha looked up as he ran towards her, hiding something behind her back. Her face paled and her mouth moved. Either her voice was lost on the wind or she was whispering to herself. Daniel closed in, but she sidestepped him, running back to the house. He was about to call her name, but she was too quick. Eisha vanished into Five Oaks, her summer dress trailing after her.

  The shape lying at the bottom of the slide was motionless. Eisha had used the play area twice before getting bored and it was the first time Daniel had visited it since. Having discovered what Eisha had left behind, he wished he’d left it longer.

  Panwar lay dead, a gunshot to his chest. Blood soaked through a dressing gown Daniel recognised as his own. Panwar’s blank eyes stared at the clouds above, wearing a smile that didn’t belong to him. It had been painted on in red, like the smile of Eisha’s massacred dolls.

  Panwar was a computer geek or had been until he was killed. From the images on his laptop, it was clear he’d rigged secretive cameras everywhere, but that wasn’t what troubled Daniel. Entrance to Five Oaks came by invitation only. How Panwar must have laughed when Daniel had told him that. Because that’s how he got in. The break-in at Lily’s was a set-up and it was Daniel who had summoned a spy into his midst.

  He grabbed a stolen breath, turning to the house. Eisha watched him from a first floor window and Daniel took off at a sprint.

  But the first floor was clear. There was no sight or sound of his daughter. Downstairs, he stalked through the kitchen, reception and storage rooms. Doors were opened and slammed shut. He entered the billiard room with its mahogany panelled walls and green baize tables. It smelled of cigar smoke, a ghostly reminder of days gone by. He looked to the panelled wall and saw the shadow of a crack.

  The door to the wine cellar was open.

  Climbing down wooden steps warped with damp, Daniel’s feet found the compacted earth of the floor. Latticed shelving held grimy bottles running both sides of the room. Cobwebs swung from flickering lights.

  At the far end of the cellar was another door, leading to a place no child should be.

  “Eisha? Are you in there?” Daniel asked.

  A muffled footstep answered his call and he opened the door to the Room.

  Eisha stood with her back to the tool chest, brushing small hands down her dress.

  “You shouldn’t be in here,” Daniel said. “This place is for grown-ups.”

  “Like you?”

  “For grown-ups like me and I don’t want you to be like me.”

  “But I am and I like it here.”

  The words cut into his heart, but Eisha wasn’t exactly like him. There was a darker level to her he didn’t understand. The way she broke into his bedroom and how she was always primed for violence. It had taken Daniel years to feel the ease she displayed so cheerfully. He suffered from nightmares in a way he didn’t believe his daughter did.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “There was a woman,” Eisha said. “She took Auntie Lily. I was in the trees. I didn’t see her face.”

  “Are you alright?”

  Eisha nodded. “But the woman chased Uncle Panwar into the garden. She had a gun. There was a noise and Uncle Panwar fell down.”

  While Daniel was putting Gilbert out of his misery, his home had been raided. Daniel beat a fist on his chest. Stupid, stupid, stupid, he thought. He checked his phone, but there was no reply from Bronson. He tapped out a text message ordering him to hurry up.

  “What happened then?” Daniel asked.

  “I found him.”

  “That’s not all you did,” Daniel said, thinking of the lipstick on Panwar’s face. “You know what I’m talking about. Why did you do that to Panwar?”

  Eisha tucked her hair behind her ears and for a second, she looked like a child. “Before he died, I was nasty to him. I shouted and thought bad things about him. When I found him by my slide, he was sad. I wanted him to be happy.”

  “Sad? He was dead,” Daniel said, trying to control the tension in his voice. “You painted a clown’s smile on a dead man’s face. What with? Lipstick?”

  Her eyes roamed the room as she leaned against the toolbox.

  “Where did you get it from?” Daniel asked.

  Shrugging, Eisha folded her arms. It didn’t take a genius to see she was hiding something. Daniel nudged her aside and looked through the toolbox. Eisha offered no resistance, but kicked out at the gurney, its leather strap arms flapping in protest.

  Inside one drawer was a selection of cleavers, stiletto knives and scalpels. The next drawer held nails and screws, like most toolboxes did, though these were caked in dried blood. When he opened the third drawer, Daniel ended his search. It was empty, or almost empty.

  Eisha tried to close it, heedless of Daniel’s fingers, but he held firm. His daughter had a toy chest in her room, but this was a toy chest of a different kind. This was Eisha’s hiding place. The lipstick was there, something called Pink Kiss, a shade he knew Lily sometimes wore.

  He found a brass key. “Is this how you get in and out of my bedroom?”

  “There are two Daddy. One for me. One for you.”

  At least, he wasn’t going mad, he thought. There was a mouldering piece of fruit he guessed was from Lily’s house, plus the tie he’d thrown into the cemetery bin and Ma Dayton’s photograph of Eisha as an innocent baby.

  He may not be going mad, but his daughter’s future seemed uncertain.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with you. I think we need help,” Daniel said.

  His head was crammed with questions, like birds trapped in a burning building. Was this Eisha’s way of keeping loved ones close? In a drawer used to house torture equipment? What about Panwar? Was he dead or simply dying when she’d painted his face?

  He remembered a phrase Lily had used and Eisha’s gruesome toolbox suddenly made sense. Where Daniel’s body had been branded by the scars of his existence, his souvenirs from a violent life, Eisha hoarded hers in a toolbox, too young to wear them on her skin.

  But why? Why had she done that to Panwar?

  Eisha laid a hand on his arm. “We’re fine the way we are.”

  She held her other hand behind her back.

  “What are you hiding?” Daniel asked. He expected Eisha to protest, but she offered her prize freely.

  “I took it when Panwar was in the shower,” she said. “I got it from his computer.”

  It was a memory stick, black and sleek. Daniel held it between his thumb and forefinger. He swallowed, running a tongue over his teeth. There was a tab on the side and written along it was Daniel’s name.

  “Can I keep the rest of my treasure?” Eisha asked.

  Daniel slipped the memory stick into his pocket, stealing it from his thieving daughter. Whatever was wrong with Eisha wasn’t her fault. Daniel had to remember that. She was family and the fault lay with him.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  There was too much to do. Lily was in danger. Daniel needed to find her, but while Panwar lay exposed in the garden, there was greater danger at Five Oaks. The memory stick would have to wait. As would Eisha’s tool chest.

  Daniel reached for a roll of plastic sheeting. “Come on. We’ve got work to do.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Lily and Monica were in the front room of a home with a sagging sofa covered in a patchwork quilt. The floor was littered with cereal bowls encrusted with dried cornflakes. Dregs of tea curdled inside scattered mugs.

  Lily stood in the corner, straddling a pile of takeaway cartons. “I don’t understand what I’m doing here.”

  She had met Monica at Lumley Castle in Durham on Monica’s wedding day. She was the princess and Ed Dayton was her knight in shining armour. The blushing bride had spoken at length about her upcoming honeymoon, how excited she was and how everyone should visit St Helena in Barbados at least once in their lives. Lily had nodded and swallowed her bitterness. Lily’s own honeymoon with Scott had been cancelled when a problem had arisen at work and Monica had known that.

  Monica’s new home smelled of sweat and stale food. Mould crawled along the ceiling. It appeared the days of sun-bathing on St Helena’s beaches were behind her.

  “Why am I here?” Lily asked.

  Pacing the room, Monica supported her pregnant stomach with the hand holding her gun.

  Next door, Mrs Clearby turned on some music. The rousing march of a brass band reverberated through the walls. Rallying trumpets caused the dirty cereal bowls to dance.

  “Just stay calm,” Monica said. “This will all be over with soon.”

  Lily almost laughed and she might have done if she wasn’t so scared. Her pretend boyfriend had assaulted her, handing her over to Monica without protest the moment she had produced a gun. As far as Lily was concerned, there was nothing to be calm about.

  “I want to leave,” she said.

  Monica had been young when she’d married the head of the Dayton family. She’d been self-absorbed and vapid, but she had never been a bad person, Lily thought. They’d all experienced trauma of some sort since that night. Lily had hardened, grown distant with those around her as a defence mechanism. But what had happened to Monica to turn her so cold, she wondered?

  Lily cleared her throat. “You disappeared after…what happened. Where did you go?”

  “As if you care,” Monica said with a snort.

  “It was difficult for all of us,” Lily said.

  Monica collapsed into the sofa, sending a cloud of dust into the air. “You’d already cut yourself off from the Daytons by then. When Ed died, I had to adapt. Do things I wasn’t happy about, but I did what I did for my baby.”

  Lily glanced at Monica’s bump. It was large. She guessed she was almost full term. “I’m not a Dayton anymore. I have nothing to do with this. Please just let me go.”

  “You are part of this,” Monica said. “It takes more than divorce papers and a change of address to escape this life. Be quiet. Your boyfriend will be here soon enough.”

  “What has Panwar got to do with this?” Lily asked.

  The muffled brass band stopped between tracks. The pause felt prolonged and Lily listened to her thudding heart keeping beat until a new tune began.

  “Panwar? That idiot in the dressing gown? I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about Daniel. It’s always about Daniel. He has something we want. Now we have something he wants.”

  Lily’s cheeks flushed. “Daniel isn’t my boyfriend.”

  Monica threw back her head and laughed. “Daniel was with me when Ed died. Did you know that? He saved me from being shot. There’s no safer pair of hands when blood is being shed and yet you keep slipping through them.”

  “How could you know about me and Daniel?” Lily asked.

  “Scott told me,” Monica said, watching Lily intently. “You do know about me and Scott, don’t you?”

  Lily slowly shook her head. “What are you talking about?”

  Monica patted her full stomach with a smile. “This ticking time bomb is almost ready to explode. By my reckoning, we conceived around the date you signed the divorce papers and by we, I mean, Scott and me.”

  “Nine months,” Lily said to herself. Her hand went to her own stomach, but it was flat and empty, save for the sickness threatening to launch up her throat. “Scott is the father?”

  “You would have known that if you’d stayed in touch. You divorced Scott, not the family.”

  The colour leached from Lily’s face. She grew light-headed and braced her hand against the wall. “Why didn’t Daniel tell me?”

  Monica picked at a thread on the sofa. “To protect you from the embarrassing truth, I suppose. Scott moved on when you couldn’t. When one door closes, another one opens, eh?”

  “Your legs opened, you mean,” Lily said, a new found anger burning within her. “You were still married to Scott’s dad.”

  Lily had assumed her ex-husband was too self-centred to love anyone, but that wasn’t true. Scott simply didn’t love her. She wasn’t the person he wanted and although she didn’t want him either, it hurt her nonetheless.

  “We have you to thank for our little miracle here. If you weren’t such a damp rag, it might never have happened,” Monica said.

  Learning of Scott’s treachery changed everything. She’d taken his bluntness as a form of honesty, but she’d been wrong. He was just cruel. Learning about Daniel’s foolhardy attempts to protect her left her feeling ill, but her body toughened, her shakes subsided. She was tall and strong. Surrounded by Daytons, she absorbed their callousness and felt more like them than ever before.

  “You can have Scott,” Lily said, marching forwards to the sound of a brass band, forcing Monica to meet her gaze. “He wasn’t good enough for me.”

  Monica grinned. “He was good enough to get me pregnant.”

  “But that’s not what you want, is it? I know women like you. You want fireworks and bells and whistles. You want the money, the status and the freedom.” Lily looked around the dingy room, opening up her arms. “And you’ve ended up here. A rathole in Seaburn. Scott didn’t love you any more than he loved me.”

  The brass band stopped, the final notes humming in their ears. It was Monica’s turn to shake. Her hand whitened as she strangled the gun.

  “Stop talking,” she said. “We have a plan.”

  “Scott was a black hole of a man,” Lily said, taking a step closer to Monica. “He consumed everything. You’d never have wanted that. You want to be someone.”

  Monica nodded and Lily’s body sagged with relief. She was getting through. She was going to make it. Just one more step. Just a little closer.

  “Why don’t you give me the gun? We can talk about it. It’ll make you feel better,” Lily said.

  “But the problem is only one of us knows the whole truth,” Monica said.

  “Then you can tell me the truth. We can be friends.”

  Monica raised the gun, stopping Lily in her tracks. She stared down the barrel at the darkness inside. Monica was smiling. Lily hoped for a sign of compassion in her eyes, but there was nothing. Whatever Scott had done to her, the job was complete. She was a Dayton like everyone else.

  An image of Daniel and Eisha flashed through Lily’s mind.

 

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