We’re here, sweetheart, Alice said. We’re always here for you!

Other voices; nearby. Male voices. A discordant noise.

‘Don’t wake your mother, Guy, she needs the rest.’

‘It’s locked!’

A rattling of the door handle. It was distracting. Marnie wished it would stop.

‘Where’s the key, Father?’

Marnie tried to shut the voices out. She looked back to where she’d seen her mother and sister; they were further away.

No! Wait! Don’t go without me! she called, don’t leave me behind!

‘The nurse insists on locking the door from the inside to stop your mother wandering.’

Alice looked back. Wake up! she called. Wake up, Marnie! Let Guy know you’re there!

‘The nurse is in there with Mother?’

‘Yes.’

Marnie’s eyes snapped open.

Call him, Marnie, Alice told her. Call out to Guy!

Marnie lifted her face from the carpet. She opened her mouth. She cried: Help!

It was nothing, a faint croak; barely audible to her own ears.

‘Go home, old chap,’ Mr deVillars said. ‘I’ll call you in the morning.’

HELP!

She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t make a sound loud enough to save her life.

You can do this, Marnie. Do it for Lucy! Call him!

‘Help!’ Marnie cried.

On the other side of the door, Guy deVillars asked: ‘What was that?’

‘It was nothing.’

Louder, Marnie! Louder! Go on!

‘HELP!’

‘There it is again! Didn’t you hear it, Father? Somebody’s in trouble!’

70

One Week Later

Marnie opened the door to the caretaker’s cottage and stepped inside. She walked past the ugly dresser, climbed the creaky old stairs and went to the door of the master bedroom.

She remembered being nine years old, running up the stairs, calling, ‘Mummy! Mummy!’ and throwing open this door. Denise was on the bed, curled under the quilt with her dark hair spread about the pillow, looking as if she was sleeping.

‘Mummy?’

Marnie remembered reaching out and touching her mother’s shoulder. ‘Mummy, wake up!’

But Denise had been beyond waking.

The week before she died, John had cut some early roses for Denise and she’d been delighted by them. She’d declared their perfume ‘perfect’ and had put them in a vase on the living-room window ledge. They were delicate blooms, the outer petals pink, the inner ones yellow. The roses had made Denise happy.

Marnie never told her father about the other flowers, the ones that didn’t make her mother happy: the extravagant arrangements that used to arrive at the cottage, the ‘big flowers’ that Denise always threw away. If John had known, perhaps everything would have been different. Perhaps he’d have seen the true colours of Edward deVillars.