Laurel wonders how far she can push this personable young man before he goes on the defence. ‘Poppy,’ she says, ‘your cousin. Have you met her?’
‘No, none of us has. She’s the only cousin we haven’t met. And it’s a shame because I have another cousin about her age, Clara – she’s a laugh, she really is, such a character – and maybe they could have been friends. But that guy, the writer guy …’
‘Floyd?’
‘Yeah, that’s the guy. He keeps himself to himself and he keeps her close to home. He didn’t want to know when we suggested we could help him out with her care. I think one of my uncles went round there, you know, about a year after Noelle disappeared, tried to make a friendship.’ He shakes his head. ‘Apparently he was quite sharp with him, made it clear that we weren’t wanted.’
Laurel wonders if Poppy even knows about her Irish family.
‘How do you know them then, Poppy and Floyd?’ asks Joshua.
‘I’m … well, I’m in a relationship with Floyd, actually. He’s my boyfriend.’
‘Oh.’ He raises his brow. ‘Right.’
‘And funnily enough, Noelle used to tutor my daughter, Ellie. In fact, she was tutoring her in the weeks before she disappeared.’
‘What – here?’ He points at the floor.
‘No. Noelle came to my house. About half a mile from here.’
‘Right,’ he says. ‘Right.’
Laurel gazes at him for a moment, willing him to provide her with the strand that will unfurl the knot of threads in her head.
‘So, are you saying that something untoward happened?’ he says eventually. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’
‘I don’t know,’ Laurel says. ‘I really don’t know.’
‘It does sound a bit odd,’ he says. ‘I’ll grant you that.’ He puts his elbows on his knees and stares at the floor for a moment. ‘You’ve got me thinking now, got my brain ticking over.’ He circles his temple with his fingertip. ‘You have a mystery, and I have a mystery, and you think that maybe the two mysteries are connected?’
‘Have you ever been through Noelle’s things?’ she asks. ‘Her private things? Diaries or such?’
‘No. I never did. But there was …’ He pauses. ‘There was one thing. A really strange thing. We could never quite fathom it.’ He looks towards the door and then back again. He sighs. ‘Shall I show you?’
‘What?’
‘You’ll have to trust me, because I’m a stranger to you and I could be anyone.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, it’s in the basement.’
‘What is?’
‘The strange thing. The thing we found. In the basement.’
Laurel feels a surge of adrenaline. She looks at the boy with the sweet face sitting opposite her.
‘I’d totally understand if you don’t want to go down. I wouldn’t if I were you. Probably seen too many scary movies – you know, the ones where you go don’t go down into the basement, you bloody idiot!’
He smiles and he couldn’t look more like a nice young man over from Ireland to do a degree.
‘I could just describe it if you like. Or I can go down and take a photo on my phone for you? Would that be a better idea?’
She smiles. ‘It’s fine. I’ll go and have a look.’
‘Text someone,’ he says, still looking anxiously at her. ‘Text someone to say where you are. That’s what I would do.’
She laughs. ‘Just show me,’ she says.
The door to the basement is in the kitchen. Joshua takes a torch from a drawer and leads her down a set of wooden steps. At the bottom is a door. He pushes it open into a small square room, completely clad in the same heavily varnished pine as the living room and the kitchen. There’s a small window set high into the wall that frames the thin bare branches of the cherry tree in the front garden. There’s a small sofa pulled out into a bed, a TV set and a chair. And there’s a series of what looks like hamster cages piled up one on top of the other on a table against the far wall.
Joshua sweeps the torchlight across them. ‘There were, like, twenty-odd hamsters in those when my uncles came. And they were all dead, you know, on their backs with their little legs in the air.’ He mimes a dead hamster lying on its back with its legs in the air. ‘Some of them had eaten each other apparently. We couldn’t work it out at all. We thought maybe she’d been breeding them, y’know? Selling them to kids? But we couldn’t find any evidence of that. It’s just, like, why would you have all those animals? In your basement? And then just leave them to die?’
Laurel looks at the cages and shudders. Then she looks around again. In spite of the honey-coloured cladding, the room feels bare and cold. And there’s something else, something chilling and unnerving in the very air of the room.
‘What do you think this room was for?’ she asks, turning to examine the locks on the door, three of them in total, then turning again to look at the high window, the bare branches of the tree, the open sofa bed, the TV.
‘A guest room, I suppose.’
‘It’s not very homely, is it?’
‘No. I don’t suppose she had many guests. From all accounts she was a bit antisocial.’
‘So why would she have kept a sofa bed down here? And the TV? And all the animals that she left to die?’
‘I told you, didn’t I? I told you it was weird. To be honest, I think my aunty Noelle was probably all round weird full stop. We think losing her sister at such a young age damaged her, y’know.’
Laurel shivers again. She thinks of Hanna losing Ellie. She thinks of Hanna’s dark, soulless flat. She thinks of her humourless persona, her awkward hugs. She feels a surge of panic that her daughter might end up like Noelle Donnelly, hoarding hamsters and then disappearing, leaving behind nothing but shadows in her wake. And as she thinks all this her eye is caught by something poking out from under the sofa bed. Something small and plasticky. She reaches down to pick it up. It’s a lip balm in a bright pink and green casing. It’s watermelon-flavoured.
She turns it over in the palm of her hand and then she puts it into her pocket. For some reason she feels that it belongs to her.
Laurel’s hands shake against the steering wheel as she drives home. She can still smell the basement room at Noelle Donnelly’s house, the damp wood, the rotting carpet. Every time she closes her eyes she sees the ugly sofa bed, the piles of hamster cages, the dirty window set high in the wall.
When she gets home she goes to her spare room and pulls out Ellie’s box from under the bed once again. She rakes through pens and badges and rings and hairclips. Ellie’s toothbrush is in the box, and Ellie’s hairbrush, along with tangles of elastic bands and key rings and face creams. And there, in the mix, is a selection of lip balms. Three of them. One is papaya-flavoured, one is mango-flavoured and the other is honeydew melon. She pulls the watermelon lip balm from Noelle’s basement from the pocket of her coat and lines it up with the others.
It forms a set.
Thirty-one