Across the road, at the entrance to her own house, Hilary stands staring at him. He cannot read her gaze, too far to make out her expression, though her presence – the act of staring – brings on a lunge in his chest. He lets go of the window and steps back into the safety of the shadows. But as he does so, he recalls a line from one of her letters – the frenzied scrawl across the page, spelling out her dark threat: I want you to get rid of her, Anton, or I swear I don’t know what I’ll do!

He’d dismissed the letter when first he’d read it. But now the words crowd his thoughts and he feels behind him for the coolness of the wall, needing to steady himself against the heat of those words, the dread rising within him at what he has unleashed.

27

Leah

She reads quickly, her eyes passing over the tight weave of sentences. The letters are in no particular order, the information coming at her jumbled and confused, but still she understands. The truth of the past comes at her through these secret missives.

Anton and Hilary were lovers. The shock of that knowledge transcends the feelings described on the page. A love that was strong, obsessive.

I yearn for you. I feel you in me. Without you I am an empty vessel, my heart a wasted organ uselessly pumping blood around a body that is dry and parched for your touch.

Leah thinks of Hilary, her primness, her manners. She recalls that lunch in Hilary and Greg’s garden: the silver cutlery, the starched linen napkins. Everything just so. Hard to imagine her writing such a letter. Hard to envisage a heart bursting with such passion encased within Hilary’s stout bosom.

Leah sits on her bed as she reads the letters, one leg curled underneath her. Two days have passed since she occupied this room, and there is a stale abandoned atmosphere inside it. The smells that have become trapped here invade her nostrils: the musty dankness of the partially subterranean walls, the decaying sweetness of wilting flowers on her bedside table, slimy stems visible in brackish water through the glass vase. She is still in Jake’s T-shirt, her feet bare, her dressing-gown falling open as she puts one letter down and moves on to another.