Kathryn breathes in the dank smell of the cellar, her mind working overtime. Then she kicks the bag further into the corner of the room. She’ll have to come back and retrieve it. Burn it, if necessary. Maybe she could convince Ed to light a bonfire, until it dawns on her that Ed has never started a fire in his life and probably wouldn’t know where to begin, and if she did go home requesting such a thing, how suspicious would it look?
Damn it. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Nobody uses the cellar. Why has her mother decided to ask Una to come down here? And why can’t anybody find the fucking key for the lock? It went missing years ago and nobody’s ever bothered to replace it. Kathryn slams the door and stomps up the stairs towards the French windows. She’d only popped over to collect a painting her mother had bought from a local artist. Bloody ugly piece of a woman in a rocking chair holding a dog: the background is too dark, while the figures are cumbersome, as though the artist has used paint that was too thick. Kathryn worries that her mother’s eye for art isn’t as good as it once was. And when Elspeth had told her Una was in the cellar, Kathryn remembered with a sudden panic that that was where she’d dumped the holdall.
When she returns to the kitchen, Una and her mother are sipping wine from Elspeth’s best crystal. Not that Una seems to be enjoying it. Every swallow looks to be an effort. She doesn’t meet Kathryn’s gaze.
Elspeth’s eyes are bright. Too bright. Playful. Cruel. Kathryn braces herself for some acidic comment that’s obviously brewing in her mother. And, sure enough, ‘Checking up on Una, are we?’ she says to Kathryn, a smirk on her lips. ‘Satisfied she hasn’t made off with the Pétrus?’
Kathryn bristles. Why can’t her mother make her feel, just once, that she’s the most important – the most loved – person in the room? Instead she’s always the butt of her nasty comments. She doesn’t bother to respond. Instead she throws her mother a withering look and turns to Una. ‘Well, I’d better be off. Una, would you mind helping me carry the painting to the car? I’m parked right outside.’
Una looks as if she’d rather do anything else but she pushes her seat back obligingly and follows Kathryn to the library, like an obedient pet. She doesn’t speak and neither does Kathryn as they heave the painting from the house and into the boot of Kathryn’s SUV. Kathryn can just make out the ugly hues and clumsy paint strokes from beneath the bubble-wrap. A Picasso it isn’t.
‘You’d better get back inside,’ says Kathryn, closing the boot on the painting. There is ice on the ground, sparkling under the streetlamps, like tiny crystals. Una is shivering in her thin jumper, with the cut-out shapes in the arms, and her ripped jeans. Una pauses, as if wondering whether to say something, but must decide against it as she turns away and walks back into the house.
Kathryn has no choice but to drive to the end of the road and then wait. From here she still has a view of the house and, more importantly, of her mother’s bedroom window. She must be mad, she thinks, as she chews her nails, a habit that hasn’t disappeared since she was that anxious eight-year-old. She wonders what Ed is doing. She hopes he’s putting the boys to bed. It might be only 9 p.m. but Harry needs his sleep and Jacob is probably still on the PlayStation. Ed is much more lenient about that kind of thing than she is. She hopes Jacob’s been revising. His GCSEs are in a few months.
Does she worry about them more than is natural, her two boys? She wouldn’t know. Elspeth never seemed to worry about her or Viola. Kathryn wants to give them the childhood she never had, with parents who love them unconditionally, but Jacob is so prickly, so troublesome. Although she’s hopeful he’s settled down now. Last year … well, last year was the worst of her adult life with Jacob truly rebelling, first running away from home so that he could doss down with whoever. And then there was the time she found him drunk on the Downs with a group of older boys. She’d done everything right, yet she was terrified that Jacob would end up like her birthmother. Maybe it was in the genes and had skipped a generation.
She rings Ed to tell him she’s been held up at work and to remind him to make sure Jacob’s off the PlayStation. He sounds sleepy, distracted, but agrees, telling her not to worry, that she can rely on him. She ends the call wondering if she can.
It’s over an hour before she notices Elspeth’s bedroom light is on. She’s freezing and her body aches from being in the same position for too long. She watches Una’s silhouette in the sash window as she closes the curtains.
When Kathryn’s certain she won’t be seen, or heard, she creeps out of the car, down the street, into the front garden, slipping through the side gate until she’s standing in front of the cellar again. She pulls the padlock from the bolt and pushes open the door. The creak reverberates into the dark night. Her plan is to take the holdall and put it into the car until she can decide where to dispose of it. The passport will be the main problem. Using her phone as a torch, she’s almost on her hands and knees as she feels her way to the corner, where she’d kicked the bag earlier. She reaches out her hand, hoping to feel it, to see the familiar canvas holdall. But it’s an empty space, just cobwebs and dust. The bag has gone.
23
Una
‘I’ve got the bag here,’ I tell Courtney. I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed with the holdall open in front of me. ‘It’s got to be Jemima’s. Her passport’s here.’
Courtney takes a sharp intake of breath. ‘Shit. I can’t believe you took it.’
‘I had to. I knew Kathryn would go back for it.’
‘But what are you going to do with it?’