amantha came across her uncle Jeremy in the parlour when she was making her final rounds of the night. She'd been checking doors and windows—by virtue of habit rather than by virtue of the fact that the family had anything of value worth burgling at this point—and she'd marched into the parlour with the intention of seeing to the windows in there before she realised that he was present.
The lights were off, but not because Jeremy was sleeping. He was, instead, running an old eight-millimeter film through a projector that clacked and whirred as if on its last legs. The picture itself flickered not on a screen, because Jeremy couldn't be bothered setting that up. Rather, it moved against a bookshelf, where the curved backs of mildewing volumes distorted the figures whose images had been filmed.
He was reliving what appeared to be a long-ago birthday. Broughton Manor rose in the background—long before the building had fallen into ruinous disrepair—while in the foreground a floppy-hatted clown played the Pied Piper to a group of little children wearing party hats. The clown led them down the slope to the ancient footbridge that provided access to a meadow beyond the River Wye. And in that meadow a pony stood waiting, its reins in the hand of a man whose resemblance to the adult Jeremy told Samantha that she was looking at her maternal grandfather as a very young man. As she watched, the little boy her uncle once had been ran across the meadow and flung himself ecstatically into his fathers arms. He was lifted onto the pony's back as the other children—Samantha's own mother among them—clustered round and the clown danced a jig to soundless music.
The scene shifted in the way of home films, and they were under a tree where a table had been laid with a birthday cloth and decorations. The same children bobbed and squirmed on either side of the table, and a woman carried into the picture a cake on which five candles burned. The child Jeremy stood upon his chair to make his wish and extinguish the candles. He lost his balance and nearly toppled, to be saved from the fall by his mother. She laughed, waved at the camera, and dropped her arms to hold her son safely on the chair.
“Dead in less than two years,” Jeremy Britton said without turning from the picture that undulated against the backs of the books. His words were only mildly slurred, not nearly as incomprehensible as they usually were after a day of drinking. “She was counting out change to buy me a packet of crisps in Longnor, Mum was—Jesus, can you credit that?—and she dropped dead at the till. Gone before she hit the floor. And I said, ‘Mum, what about my crisps?’ Jesus have mercy on us all.” Jeremy lifted his glass and drank. He replaced it with such precision on the table next to his chair that Samantha wondered what he was actually drinking. He turned his head and squinted in her direction as if the light from the corridor were too bright. “Ah. It's you, Sammy. Come to join the resident insomniac?”
“I was checking the windows. I didn't know you were still up, Uncle Jeremy.”
“Didn't you.”
Jeremy turned from his scrutiny of Samantha, giving his attention back to the film. “You lose your mum, and you're marked forever,” he murmured, taking up his glass once more. “Did I ever tell you, Sammy—”
“Yes. You did.” Numerous times since her arrival in Derbyshire, Samantha had heard the story that she already knew: his mother's untimely death, his father's rapid remarriage, his own banishment to boarding school at the tender age of seven while his only sister was allowed to remain at home. “Ruined me,” he'd said time and again. “Robs a man of his soul, and don't you forget it.”
Samantha decided it was best to leave him to his musings, and she began to depart the room. But his next words stopped her.
“It's nice to have her out of the way, isn't it?” he asked with absolute clarity. “Opens things up the way they should be opened up. That's what I think. What about you?”
She said, “What? I don't … what?” and in her surprise she feigned misunderstanding in a circumstance where no misapprehension was really feasible, especially with the High Peak Courier sitting on the floor next to her uncle's chair with its front-page headline shouting Death at Nine Sisters. So it was foolish to attempt to dissemble with her uncle. Nicola's dead was going to be the subtext of every conversation Samantha had with anyone from this time forward, and it would serve her interests far better to become used to Nicola Maiden as a Rebecca-like figure in the background of her life than it would to pretend the woman had never existed at all.
Jeremy was watching the film, a smile playing round the corners of his mouth as if he found amusement in the sight of his five-year-old self skipping along the path in one of the gardens, dragging a stick along the edge of what was then a well-tended herbaceous border. “Sammy, my angel,” he said to the screen, and again his voice was remarkable for the unusual clarity of his enunciation, “how it happened isn't the point. That it happened is. And what we're going to do now that it's happened is the most important point of all.”