Evie went into her room and closed the door behind her, grateful to see everything was just as she’d left it. She dropped her bag on her bed, and went to the chest of drawers. She made a point of not looking up at Elder House. Kym was right, she had never really liked it, and now there were people there, a family; that just made it worse, although she couldn’t have said why.

She opened the drawer. It was uncharacteristically untidy; underwear and tights and odd socks lay in a great tangle, exactly as they had the last time she looked. She pushed everything to one side, revealing an old chocolate box, its lid slightly buckled in one corner. It was shallow and more or less fitted the dimensions of the drawer, and, as far as she knew, her mum had never noticed it; it was her hiding place. Evie opened it.

It looked like junk, mostly; single earrings and scraps of chain and ribbon. There was the remains of the old charm bracelet she had retrieved from her mother’s jewellery box, a tie pin someone had given her dad one Christmas, which he never wore. Broken bits of costume jewellery, with clasps missing or lacking a hook. There were new pieces too, modern necklaces and bracelets from high street shops, most still bearing their prices, one or two weighed down by their security tags. Evie opened her bag, it took her a minute to find what she was looking for; she’d had to drop it inside quickly, without looking, and it had fallen right to the bottom.

But her fingers closed on it eventually, and she pulled it out, running her thumb over the surface as she dropped it into the box: Kym’s hagstone, dark grey and with a single hole, natural and smooth, drilled through at one corner. It was shaped like an arrowhead, or a teardrop – or a heart.

Chapter 17

17

The bathroom was at the back of the house, and as it was overlooked by nothing but the steep slope of the cliff, there was no frosted glass in the windows. It was almost pleasant, Nell decided, soaking underneath a layer of scented bubbles, the way the dull green light sort of slid into the room, peaceful, at least. She had opened one of the windows, just a little, and the air was still, the silence punctuated by the odd seagull cry.

She closed her eyes, tried not to think about the story she’d watched on the video, and gradually she felt the muscles in her back begin to soften, relax. After a week of restless nights, she began to drift away.

She was barely aware of it at first.

One-two.

One-two.

She listened. Someone was making their way down Maude’s little stepladder the way a small child might, one step at a time, one-two – left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot; descending slowly.

Maude.