Catherine
After that I leave the café. It’s so cold outside, I pull up the collar of my coat, wishing I’d brought a scarf. The sky is grey and leaden again. But the shopfronts look gorgeous, all lit up for Christmas with flashing baubles and tinsel garlands, window edges white with spray-on snow, carols playing as I pass the open doorways.
I go back to Mum and Dad’s house, feeling as if a weight has been lifted. Dominic was right to tell me to write the letter. It was absolutely the right thing to do.
To my surprise, the front door is ajar.
I go in and stop a moment, listening. The house is quiet, except for some rustling further down the hallway.
‘Hello?’ I say.
There’s a sudden silence.
The passage is dimly lit, but there could be somebody there. Is that a shadow moving, or is it my imagination?
‘Hello?’ I repeat more loudly, my back to the front door.
Kasia appears in the kitchen doorway, a dripping mop in her hand. A strong smell of bleach wafts down the hall. She stares at me, clearly impatient. ‘Yes?’
‘Where is everyone?’
The cleaner shrugs, a slight flush of exertion in her sallow cheeks. ‘Your father . . . he goes to the office. I think your mother goes Christmas shopping.’ She glances down at the trail of drips left by her mop, her expression distracted. ‘I clean the floor.’
She’s wearing make-up again, I notice. Black kohl eyeliner, mascara, dark-green eyeshadow. As I recall, she never used to wear make-up to work. Now I rarely see her without it.
I remember the tension I’ve sensed between her and Mum since moving back in. I thought it was over me, that the presence of two more people in the house had laid unwanted extra duties on Kasia. But perhaps there’s another reason. A more sinister reason.
‘When did my dad go out?’ I ask.
Kasia shrugs, still studying the wet floor. ‘Five minutes? Ten? You just miss him.’
Her lipstick is smudged and her hair tousled. The top three buttons of her white blouse are undone. Her short skirt looks remarkably unsuited to housework.
I’ve seen my dad looking at her covertly.
No . . . impossible.
Dad wouldn’t be unfaithful to Mum. Not in a million years.
Or would he?
Kasia’s married, too. Or has small kids, at any rate. She could be divorced, I suppose. I realise with a shock that I don’t actually know much about Kasia Lecinska. Except that her Polish surname is pronounced ‘let-chin-scar’ and she didn’t like me moving back in here with Dominic. That last is just instinct on my part, of course. A chilly atmosphere whenever I walk into a room where she’s working.
But perhaps Kasia wishes we weren’t here at all. Perhaps there used to be less chance of being disturbed while my mother was out of the house . . .
That bright-red lipstick.
Everything inside me comes to a boil.
‘Did you do it, Kasia? Last night. The writing on the wall.’ I study her suddenly startled face. ‘Was it you?’
Chapter Twenty-Eight Kasia is instantly on the defensive. ‘I don’t know what . . . what it means,’ she says warily, her accent thickening.
‘I think you know perfectly well what I’m talking about. Someone wrote my name on my bedroom wall last night. Along with a hangman’s noose. You understand what a noose is?’
I demonstrate with a quick-jerk gesture of being hanged, and she gazes back at me in horror.
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ I fumble in my coat pocket and drag out the offending lipstick, a smooth black tube. When we got home last night, I found my mother had closed it and left it on my dressing table. Pulling off the lid, I screw it up to show her the mashed stump of scarlet lipstick. Or what’s left of it. ‘With this. See?’
Kasia looks at it, her brows contracting. ‘Lipstick?’ She sounds perplexed. ‘On the wall?’
‘A sick joke.’
‘Yes.’
‘You did it.’
Her eyes widen, then she understands. ‘No.’
‘Who else could have done it?’
‘I don’t know.’ She backs towards the kitchen door again, staring at me, the wet mop banging against her leg. ‘I clean the floor. Your mother asks me.’
And with that, she’s gone.
I’m half tempted to follow her into the kitchen, but don’t. What good would it do?
I twist the lipstick down and replace the lid. The click is loud in the silence.
I don’t care what my parents believe. I didn’t do it.
So who did? Could it really have been Kasia?
By the time Dominic and I got back to the house last night, my parents were in bed and all the lights were off. We crept up to our bedroom, hand in hand, trying not to make too much noise. The wall above the bed was still damp, but clean of any lipstick. There was a faint reddish smear where the hangman’s noose had been.
I know somebody went up to our bedroom yesterday and left that drawing on the wall for me to find. And maybe it wasn’t Kasia. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t know who did it. She could have let someone else into the house. Or failed to shut the front door, as she apparently did today, so that anyone could just walk in off the street.
As Dominic said, whoever did it wanted to frighten me.
But who? And why?
Unable to answer that, I head for my father’s study instead. The door is often locked because his work at the Foreign Office sometimes involves keeping sensitive documents on the premises.
To my relief though, like the front door, his study isn’t locked today.
I don’t want to hand the letter over in person, that would be too embarrassing. But I’d dreaded having to leave the letter somewhere more public like the kitchen, for instance. Even if I know Kasia would never dare to open and read it, the very fact that I’m writing to my parents when we live under the same roof must seem strange. Especially after my accusation just now.
I hate people knowing my business. My dad calls it being ‘secretive’. But if so, I got it from him. As a diplomat, he often has to be secretive. I’ve never understood why being secretive is a strength for him, but a weakness for me.
Double standards.
In my dad’s study, the full-length curtains are still closed, the lights off. I guess he didn’t come in here before leaving for the office today, or not for long. I love this room, always have. It feels so snug. The walls are insulated with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, several shelves of rare calf-bound volumes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries housed in a glass-fronted cabinet. A few early editions of Milton’s Paradise Lost are among his collection.
I don’t bother putting on the lights. There’s enough daylight creeping in around the curtain edges to navigate my way across the room to his large, leather-topped desk.
I pull the letter out of my handbag, and smooth it out. I’ve sealed it inside a plain white envelope, and written Mum and Dad on the front.
It seems ridiculously formal.
But Dominic’s right; this is the least painful way to get answers. Assuming they reply and don’t just ignore my letter.
There’s a photo frame on his desk. It’s a photograph I don’t remember seeing before. A holiday snap of Mum on some windswept beach when she was much younger. A baby in a swimsuit is squirming on her hip. Is it me or Rachel? It’s hard to tell, the baby’s face is hidden under a pink sun hat and those chubby legs could belong to either of us.
I lean the envelope upright against the photo frame where Dad can’t fail to see it. There’s a creaking noise in the hallway and I turn my head.
The study door is ajar.
‘Hello?’ I say.
There’s someone outside the door, I’m sure of it. No sound, but I can feel a change in atmosphere. A sense of someone standing there and listening. Breathing quietly.
I frown, straightening. ‘Kasia? Is that you?’
No answer. But the light levels in the room flicker, then steady again, as if someone has just slipped soundlessly past the door, blocking out the light for a second.
I stiffen and stare at the partly open door, holding my breath.
Is someone else in the house?