‘Back in a tick,’ she said.
By the time she reached it the call had gone to voicemail. The number had been withheld. She dialled to hear the recording.
‘This is a message for Dr Rebello.’ The caller spoke with a quaint, mid-Atlantic accent. Ruby thought of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. ‘My name is Grace Taylor, and I’m calling to arrange an interview.’
She gave details of a hotel she would be staying at the following week, and instructed Ruby to meet her in the hotel restaurant at half eleven on Tuesday. The message ended there. Grace didn’t provide any other contact details.
Granny Bee had said that Grace liked to keep people guessing: she was deliberately obscure. Having met Grace, Bee’s explanation was convincing. Ruby remembered how Grace placed a finger to her lips in the gallery shop, as if they were co-conspirators. That kind of game troubled her, because she felt as though she were being manipulated. But now Ruby’s conversation with Ginger made her wonder if another explanation lay behind Grace’s behaviour. How much were future and past jumbled in Grace’s mind? She’d travelled years into the future on multiple occasions. Maybe she was too dislocated from the events the rest of them lived through. Was she confused about what Ruby knew, and what she didn’t?
Suddenly, Grace seemed a pitiable figure. Ruby didn’t know, yet, whether to feel sorry for her or afraid of her. At least, in just a few days, she would get the chance to pin her down.
9
MAY 2018
Odette
Having crammed successfully, Odette survived her final exams. She neglected celebrating with friends in Cambridge and instead went home for a family meal in Hounslow. The guest list was limited to three, because Odette’s older sister, Ophélie, now lived in Mahé. Three was enough. The hawthorn was flowering in the garden. Her father Robert was playing the piano, and her mother Claire was making octopus curry.
‘Can you do my laundry too, Maman?’ Odette rested her head on the table in mock idleness. The waxed oak smelt like home. French exercise books were stacked in towers at the table’s edge, to form a skyline of Maman’s marking.
‘Laundry and cooking don’t mix.’ Maman swooped to kiss Odette’s head. ‘Not unless you want underwear in your coconut sauce.’
Odette slunk like a child to the utility room, her holdall in hand. She crammed the machine with T-shirts and spring dresses that she hadn’t had time to wash while she was revising. The softener bottle was cracked. Her hands slickened with soap. No matter; there was a sink. She ran the hot tap and the boiler audibly ignited.
The whoosh transported her back to the museum, where she could hear nothing but the basement boiler and breathe nothing but the stench of death. She believed the blood was on the floor again. She believed the body was slumped before her with its broken head and hand and heart. The world had been disturbed and made no sense.
Odette was oblivious to the water still running over her palm. The temperature rose, until her father – who had entered the room without her realising – snatched her hand from the stream.
‘Midge,’ he said quietly. ‘Midge, come back.’
Her childhood nickname reached her. She stared at the red mark on her hand.
‘Oh, God,’ she groaned.
‘I came to say don’t use the softener.’
‘Too late.’
‘Is this happening to you a lot?’
‘Laundry mishaps?’
‘No. You… disappearing.’
‘I knew what you meant. Sorry, Papi.’ Odette breathed deeply. ‘It’s happening some of the time. Especially at night. It’s the strangest thing – every so often I forget where I am and really believe I’m back in the museum basement. This time it was the sound of the boiler that set me off. It reminded me too much of the museum boiler, I think. You won’t tell Maman, will you? You know how anxious she gets.’
‘I’ll keep quiet on one condition. You need someone to talk to.’
Odette was tiring of people telling her she needed support. The psychologist; Stuart Yelland; her father. And now Papi had her in a corner – either she must find someone to talk to, or worry her mother unduly.
‘So you’re giving me an ultimatum?’ she checked.
‘Yes. Now let me put you in touch with a professional.’ Papi was a GP.
‘No. I don’t want to see one of your friends. Maman might still find out if you do that and I really don’t want to worry her.’
‘Odette…’
‘I’ll find my own counsellor… I promise. You don’t need to arrange it.’
Papi nodded, grudgingly.
They went back upstairs. Maman was uncorking Prosecco in the kitchen.
‘Let’s watch the sunset while we eat,’ she said.
Odette accepted a glass gratefully. They dined outside, on the decking, while the clouds turned the colour of Odette’s scalded palm. Enough time passed for her wine to dull the sting. Sunsets were always so slow in England. That was one of the things Odette remembered about Seychelles; the way the sun went instantly, like the flicking of a switch, at the end of the day.
*
For months Dr Rebello’s number had lain undisturbed behind a bank card in Odette’s purse. But with Papi’s threat hanging over her, Odette knew she had to ring. She hoped there would be a long waiting list. That might be enough to get her off the hook with Papi; she could at least say she tried. Unfortunately her telephone call was answered within three rings and an appointment was available the following day.
She turned up as arranged. The clinic was in a Victorian townhouse; Odette could picture it as the workplace of a gruff Austrian, dispensing treatments for neurosis and hysteria. She peered at the panel of buttons on the intercom and pressed the one labelled Dr Ruby Rebello.
‘My name’s Odette,’ she said to the speaker. ‘I have an appointment with—’
The intercom buzzed before she had completed her sentence. Odette stepped into a plain corridor with a stairway. She was about to knock on the nearest door when it swung open – to reveal the young, dark-haired woman Odette had met on the motorbike. Dr Rebello.
‘Come in, Odette.’ Dr Rebello smiled. She was olive-skinned and quiet-voiced, with a diamond nose-stud, a lumberjack shirt, and twelve-hole Docs.
She led Odette into a room with white walls and a beige carpet. Two chairs were arranged opposite each other. A coffee table, bearing a cactus and a box of tissues, was placed between them.
Dr Rebello sat down, and placed a notebook on her knee. She gestured to the other seat and invited Odette to explain why she’d come.
‘Back in January – when you gave me your card – I’d just discovered a body in the toy museum. I suppose the police told you that much?’
Dr Rebello made a note. She hesitated, then said: ‘Let’s concentrate on what you have to say, shall we? We needn’t concern ourselves with the police’s account right now.’
This comment reassured Odette. She had found the police subtly discrediting. They had implied she was lying or mistaken about the basement being locked from the inside. The officer’s focus on her birthplace told her they thought she didn’t belong there – in their eyes she was out of place, and because of this she might be unreliable or even suspect. To hear that Dr Rebello was more interested in Odette’s own version of events made her more willing to open up.
‘Since January, I’ve been having flashbacks,’ she said.
‘What kind of flashbacks?’