‘What were you telling us, Frankie baby?’ Helen spoke out loud, an idea springing into her head. Sean had put a whole box full of Frankie’s artistic efforts up in the loft just a couple of weeks earlier – naps and finger paintings and bits of macaroni glittered and glued onto wrinkled craft paper. He’d been all for chucking them out with the recycling, but Helen had put her foot down, and the loft had been the compromise. What if someone had been watching Frankie for weeks, and this has been her way of trying to tell them?

She walked up to the second floor, Alice’s domain and, out of habit, frowned at the dirty washing and creased wet towels that Alice had dumped on the landing, not even bothering to move the two paces necessary to reach the laundry basket. The pole that opened the loft trap door was lying by the skirting board behind the basket. Helen picked it up, hooked the end into the catch, and pulled down the ladder. From below, she could hear Sean shouting at the TV.

Fifteen minutes later she climbed back down the ladder, her feet blindly trying to find the treads, and her mind blindly trying to process what she had just seen.

Chapter 40

Chapter 40
Patrick – Day 7

Patrick had seen some unspeakable things over the course of his career, but something about the sight of the swollen, bandaged girl lying motionless in the hospital bed moved him so much that he had to turn his face away from the porthole window of the room, tears actually coming to his eyes and his throat catching.

Perhaps it was that her appearance was so at odds with the beautiful photograph of he’d seen of her the day before on the kitchen wall of her house, which had immortalized her as someone she would never ever be again – a vibrant teenager at the tipping point between girlhood and womanhood, her skin flawless, apricot-rosy, her eyes shining with the assurance of her beauty.

Or maybe it was a paternal instinct, that this could be Bonnie, twelve years from now. It was the same dreaded unbidden thought that he awoke to suddenly at night. Recently, it had been whoever took Liam and Izzy might come for Bonnie too. In the dead of night, all the children on whom horrors and tragedies were visited wore Bonnie’s face, and Patrick could never save her.

Georgia’s eyes were open – just barely. They looked like two puffy black water-wings. She lay listlessly on her pillows with her hair spread across them like the Lady of the Lake. Patrick suspected April had arranged it that way, probably to distract from the awful swollen abomination that was once her daughter’s face.