Putting the kettle on felt like a gentle first step in establishing herself here, legitimate occupation. Burglars didn’t make tea, generally speaking. While she waited for it to boil, she went to the door and looked out. Winter had the garden in a stranglehold. Frost covered the patio and the roses that climbed the wall by the shed. Against the colourless sky, the silver birch trees looked wraithlike.
The back door key was where it had always been, in the clay ladybird made by Adam at primary school. On the back of a chair hung the Fair Isle sweater that Jacqueline had used to keep her head dry on the day of the funeral. Rowan put it on, catching a trace of bergamot scent.
Her lungs tightened with the cold as she climbed the steps to the lawn. Underfoot, the ground was adamantine. The temperature hadn’t risen above freezing since Friday and it had been sodden then. There would be flooding when it thawed.
As she neared the ruined grass, she experienced the same strange pull she’d felt before, as if what had happened here had created an energy field. The area was four feet wide by eight long – about the size of a cemetery plot. Stepping carefully, she examined the ground. Rain had flattened the earth but at the far end, frost glittered on ridges of mud raised by shoes or boots with heavy treads.
To her relief, there was nothing more to see. What had she expected, though? Whoever dealt with these things would have cleaned up when they finished; they wouldn’t have left anything significant or distressing.
What did surprise Rowan now she was thinking more clearly was how far the area was from the house: twelve or fourteen feet, the width of the patio and the little flowerbed. She looked at the roof and tried to visualise a trajectory. Granted, she didn’t know much about the physics of falling but she’d have guessed that someone slipping off the roof would have landed much nearer the house. Clearly, there was nothing remarkable about it, however: if there had been, the police would have been on to it.
Back then, the top floor had belonged to Marianne and Adam. To give her the space she needed to paint, Adam had let Mazz have the bigger room at the back of the house, which also got the best natural light. Even at fifteen, she’d treated it more like a studio than a bedroom.
When the three doors to the upper landing – their two rooms and the skinny bathroom they shared – were closed, the top of the house had been dark but now, even though the day was beginning to fade, it was filled with light. The doors weren’t open, however: they were gone.
On the middle landing Rowan hesitated, apprehensive. There was a growing tension in the air, as if all the time that she had been down in the kitchen, drinking her tea, Marianne had been up in the studio, waiting. Come on, Rowan, what are you doing? Hurry.
When she reached the top floor, she saw that it wasn’t just the doors that were gone, but the rooms themselves. Instead, there was one huge white space interrupted only by a short surviving section of what must have the bathroom wall, presumably load-bearing. The carpet was gone, too; her boots made a hollow, stranger-at-the-saloon sound on bare boards. The change was disorientating, violent, as if a bomb had gone off. Apart from the bit of wall, all that remained of the bathroom was the plumbing. The bath and old washbasin had been torn out and replaced with a deep china trough underneath which huddled a stash of dirty glass jars full of brushes, the source, she guessed, of the boat-yard smell of oil paint and turps.
She was standing now where Marianne’s easel had been the day she had posed naked on the stool, the old heater panting like a lecher in the cold. What would she have thought that afternoon, if she’d known that fewer than fifteen years later, Marianne would be dead? That she wouldn’t have spoken to her for a decade? It was ridiculous, Marianne was a professional artist, of course she’d needed a proper studio, but nonetheless, Rowan was hurt. Her old room had been the locus of their friendship, too, their op centre, and its transformation felt personal, as if Marianne had chosen to rip up that time and start again with this big blank canvas. When had she done it? Had Rowan spent years imagining her in a room that no longer existed?
Footsteps ringing, she walked further in. There were windows to the east and west now as well as the two large north-facing sashes that gave the pure light Marianne used to talk about. The sun would slowly rotate around the studio as the day went on, eventually setting beyond Adam’s dormer.
Rowan ran her eyes over a pine table covered with plastic bottles and aerosols, wrinkled aluminium paint tubes, a Mason jar full of pens and pencils, a pile of sketchpads, a folded cloth stiff with paint. On the wall next to it, a huge corkboard bristled with sketches and postcards, handwritten notes, newspaper pages, a swatch of Art Deco Liberty lawn. Marianne had always had a board, a repository for anything that triggered an idea, a spark of inspiration. She’d called it her external brain.
Rowan walked into Adam’s part of the space and immediately stopped.