I cross the attic to the left-hand wall. There’s a large wooden chest, about five feet by three, with a pile of blankets neatly stacked on top. Nothing out of place there either. I take a last look around, glad that my fears about Layla hiding up here are unfounded. I’m just about to go back to the trapdoor when I find myself taking another look at the wooden chest. Nothing out of place – yet there’s something about it that doesn’t seem quite right. It’s the dust, I realise. Or rather, the lack of it. I reach out and run my finger along the edge of the lid; it comes away clean.
I bring my hand down hard on the top blanket, expecting dust to fly everywhere but there is very little. Which means they were protected by something until very recently. My heart quickens. Had they been in the chest and were taken out to make room for something else?
Something else. Unease prickles my spine and I find myself taking a step back, away from the chest. My heartbeat slows to a dull thud, a response to the horror that is spreading through my body. I try to close off my mind, to not go where it wants to take me, but everything – the countdown, Layla’s last message telling me that I should have chosen her, the little Russian doll placed directly under the trapdoor as a kind of clue – all seem to point to one thing. It isn’t possible, I mutter to myself, it isn’t possible, Layla wouldn’t harm Ellen. But hadn’t she told me to get rid of Ellen, hadn’t she given me ten days? Had she ended up doing what I couldn’t?
I can barely breathe. I need to call the police, now, before it’s too late. But it is too late. If Layla has done what I think she’s done, it’s already too late. Unless she hasn’t – I can hardly bear to think the word – killed Ellen, only hidden her.
I drop to my knees in front of the chest. I don’t want to open it but I know that I have to. Please God, please God, don’t let Ellen be dead, please don’t let her be dead.
My hands are shaking as I move the blankets from the top of the chest and lay them on the floor. My breath judders in my throat, stopping air from reaching my lungs. I grip the edge of the lid, steadying myself. Then, dragging my courage from where it’s residing in the pit of my stomach, I throw the lid open and look inside.
My mind spins in disbelief, draining the blood from my face.
FIFTY-FIVE
Finn
I stare down at the dissected corpses of hundreds of Russian dolls, wondering if I’m hallucinating. I reach out and touch one. The feel of the painted wood against my hand tells me they’re real. But my mind won’t accept it. I was so sure that I’d find Ellen trussed up inside the chest, dead even, that I begin digging underneath the dolls, scooping them to one side of the chest, then to the other, believing that I’m going to find her. And then, when I finally accept that she isn’t there, I let out a howl of pure rage at being fooled by Layla yet again. I can’t believe that I’m no nearer to finding Ellen, or that I’m still part of Layla’s macabre game, that now I’m going to have to figure out why she’s left a chest full of Russian dolls for me to discover, and try to work out the message behind it.
A message. On my knees, I begin rifling through the wooden carcasses, hoping to find something, a doll still intact with a piece of paper hidden inside, maybe. But they’ve all been pulled apart and it suddenly dawns on me that I haven’t come across a single one of the tiniest dolls. What I have in front of me are their left-behind, unwanted relatives. Which means that unless Layla brought them all to the house with her earlier this evening, took them up to the attic and hid them in the chest – which is possible but not likely, because there are so many of them – the little Russian dolls that Ellen and I found outside the house, or received through the post, all originated here, in the attic.
Shock rocks me back onto the floor. I sit, my elbows on my knees, staring at the chest, while the truth ricochets through my brain – that Ellen is somehow involved in all this. Layla couldn’t have got the dolls into the attic without help from someone. She’s never been to the house so she wouldn’t have known the attic existed, or that the dolls could be hidden there. Only Ellen could have told her.
During all those weeks when Layla had been in contact with me, it had never occurred to me that she might also have been in contact with Ellen, sending her emails just as she’d been sending me emails. Manipulating Ellen just as she’d been manipulating me. When she’d been urging me to tell Ellen she was back, had she been urging Ellen to tell me the same thing? Had she been playing us off against each other? Had she arranged to meet Ellen somewhere, just as she had arranged to meet me? Is that where Ellen had gone those times she’d left a note on the table for me, the notes saying she had gone shopping? She never normally left notes, she always came and told me if she was going out, yet those two times she hadn’t. Was it because she didn’t want me to know she was going out in case I asked to go with her? Maybe she had only asked me to join her for lunch to give her notes a more genuine flavour, counting on the fact that I probably wouldn’t see the notes until it was too late, or not at all. And if I had, and had phoned her, she would have told me that she was already on her way home. Not only that, when she’d come back that time, I’d thought she was upset with me. But maybe the reason she was upset was because she’d gone to meet Layla and Layla hadn’t turned up, like she used to do with me.
I leave the attic, desperate to disprove every theory I’ve just come up with. But the absence of signs of a struggle in the bedroom or anywhere else in the house again suggests that Ellen left of her own accord, that Layla didn’t force her to leave. I check her office and find that not only is her computer switched off, it’s also unplugged. It’s useless to me anyway; even if I get it up and running again, I don’t know her email password. There must have been something incriminating on it – emails between her and Layla, perhaps – for her to have turned it off so completely. Or perhaps it’s a statement of intent, as in ‘I’m never going to use my computer again because I’m never coming back.’
What had happened here, just a few hours ago? Had Layla asked Ellen to choose between me and her, just as she had asked me to choose between Ellen and her, and had Ellen chosen Layla? I couldn’t blame her, not after what I’d done, not after I’d chosen Layla over her.
My mind ploughs on relentlessly, finding new theories to torment myself with. Maybe Ellen was part of it all along, maybe she’s always known Layla’s whereabouts. Maybe my whole relationship with her was a farce, payback for the hurt I caused Layla, even though Layla had hurt me first. Is that really what this is all about? Revenge? It’s hard to believe.
A wave of exhaustion hits me. I check my mobile and see that it’s midday. I try and work out how long I’ve been awake but my mind is so fuddled it takes me a while. I didn’t sleep all night, so nearly thirty hours. Suddenly, more than anything I want to sleep, because when I wake up I might find it’s all been some terrible nightmare. But first, Tony.
I psyche myself up so that I’m not disappointed if I can’t get through to him, now that I’ve decided to tell him everything. But he answers almost at once.
‘I need your help, Tony.’
‘Fire away,’ he says. ‘But first, take a deep breath.’ And I realise how agitated I must sound. It’s nothing to how I sound when I begin speaking, though. Even to my ears the whole, unabridged story – the Russian dolls, the emails, my trips to St Mary’s and Ellen’s subsequent disappearance – sounds mad. I sound mad. When I eventually get to the end of my monologue, because Tony didn’t interrupt me once, there’s only silence, confirming what I thought, that I sound completely unhinged.
‘I’m coming down,’ he says, putting me out of my misery.
It’s as if a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders. ‘Thanks, Tony, I really appreciate it.’
‘But I need you to do something for me.’
‘Of course.’
‘I want to check a few things this end first so I’ll be a few hours. Make yourself something to eat and get yourself to bed. You sound as if you’re at death’s door. Leave the key under the mat and I’ll let myself in.’
‘Thanks, Tony,’ I say again.