‘Shut her up!’
The guard with eyes as black as ebony chips was coming.
Liese tried.
She threw her hands over Lottie’s mouth, but Lottie struggled and bit and thrust them away.
The dogs pulled. The doll burst open in a ragged cloud. Lottie’s scream roared like a tempest.
‘She’s a child. She doesn’t understand.’
But Liese’s plea was no match for the dog’s frantic barking, for the guards’ frenzied shouts; for the searching eyes that had found their target.
The hand that grabbed Lottie and tore her away was the size of a man’s. Flat and broad and scarred in a zigzag line that ran from its middle finger down to the thickset wrist. It circled Lottie’s neck like a collar.
Seconds.
That was all it took. For the snap. For the splash that swallowed the broken body down into the lake. For Liese’s world to fall, hopelessly and forever, apart.
Part Three
Ten
Karen
Aldershot, November 1989
Karen closed the front door, her knees sagging as the night caught up with her.
‘Go home – get some rest. He’s stable; we don’t expect any change for a while.’
Home: was that what she should call this place? It was the shorthand her friends still used to describe the houses they grew up in, no matter how many new families and mortgages stood between then and now. Karen studied the hallway’s non-descript paint and old-fashioned coat stand, the age-spotted mirror with its fine layer of dust. Nothing had changed in the eleven years since she had lived here.
‘Home.’
She tried it. It sat no more comfortably with her now than it had then. She knew she should have booked a hotel, taken a moment to think before she jumped into the car, but the thought he might be dying had terrified her. She could do it now, but a day and a night with no sleep beyond what could be snatched in a hospital chair had left her head fuzzy.
It was only a house. Would it be that difficult to manage a few hours inside it? Enough time at least to regroup and maybe take a bath. Karen’s skin prickled with the anticipation of hot water and vanilla-thick bubbles. Despite the sharp November wind and the threat of snow hanging in the charcoal sky, the upside-down day clung damp and sticky. The early-morning motorway dash, the overheated ward; the shock of seeing her father so helpless, a gaping hospital gown wiping away the familiarity of his collar-and-tie dignity. A bath then, to straighten her out and settle her nerves.
Karen was on the bottom stair before she remembered that the towels would be cardboard-thin and the soap unperfumed carbolic. Her shoulders reknotted.
‘You have to do something; you can’t just stand here.’
Her voice croaked from a night spent whispering. It still cracked like a gunshot down the hallway, stirring memories like dry leaves as it went. Was that why she’d spoken out loud, to stamp herself on the house’s silence? To make the house fit round her for a change? Talking to herself was something she never did, despite living on her own; it was something she had never been remotely temped to do.
Karen shivered and failed to convince herself the chilly air was to blame.
What is it you English like when everything is falling to pieces? Father Kristoff. She hadn’t thought of him for years.
‘And it isn’t odd that you’ve remembered him now you’ve come back here, so don’t overthink it.’
She threw out the words and followed them, imagining her voice carving out a path like a force field. A form of madness no doubt, but at least one of her own choosing.
The kitchen she eased herself into had the sour edge of too-long-left garbage. Karen opened a window and began rooting through the cupboards. Not tea: seven-thirty in the morning or not, she was past that sort of soothing, and surely she’d been up for so long the rules didn’t count. She stretched onto her toes and was rewarded with the bottle of whisky Andrew was never without, whatever his indifference to other home comforts. She poured a generous measure, realised she couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten and set about foraging.
The fridge was a forest of Tupperware and carefully parcelled-out portions. Karen located cheese and a jar of pickle; slotted bread under the eye-level grill. The kitchen was, as ever, ordered with military precision: the tea towels smartly lined up on their pegs, the floor brush firmly twinned with its dustpan. Not unlike her own neatly kept kitchen, although she doubted Andrew would ever believe that.
‘There really is no one at home to take care of him?’
‘No, not full-time. I wish there was, but my mother is dead and I’m an only child. Besides, I live in London and he’s very happy here; he would never agree to move from Aldershot. And my job is demanding. I have holiday owing, which, of course, I’ll use, but then I have to get back to it.’
The consultant had shaken his jowls and sighed over modern women’s priorities.
Karen wouldn’t budge – she couldn’t. She struggled to adequately describe her relationship with her father to herself and to the people who cared about her; she certainly wasn’t about to expose it to the consultant’s insulated ideas.
The nurse had waited until the great man had moved on and then handed over a list of phone numbers.
‘Assisted living is your best bet. He’ll be here for a few weeks yet; there’s time to get things sorted.’
Assisted living. Andrew would call it ‘going into a home’ and no doubt hate anywhere she suggested, but what choice did they have?
Karen tried to imagine a world in which she played the doting daughter to his grateful father and poured herself another drink to wash away the guilt. A heart attack and a serious one at that, needing something called stents and a long recuperation: it was the last thing she’d expected. Admittedly, her father was seventy-three, but his military training had kept him fit and he had always seemed, physically at least, far younger than his years.
The sun prodded pale and watery through the window. Karen finished the last of her toasted cheese as the light inched in.
The kitchen wasn’t as clean as first appearances suggested. A spider’s web looped from the light fitting; rusty stains spattered the hob.
Karen turned away: they played such tightly defined roles around each other, he would hate her to suspect his high standards were slipping. Well, she could play the good daughter this far at least. She found a bottle of bleach and steeled her tired body to tackle the cleaning. Then the disinfectant smell flew back hospitals and tubes and translucent waxy skin and she found herself sobbing. The kitchen wobbled, expanding and contracting around her as if she was shrinking.
How could the house still unpeel her like this?
It shouldn’t mean a thing anymore. It wasn’t as if she had ever been a regular visitor: the nights she had spent under its roof since she left barely made it into double figures. Karen counted back through them, aware that if she revealed their sparseness to anyone else, they would shame her. A couple of miserable Christmases until she found friends with families big enough to absorb her. A handful of trips back in her university days, usually motivated by lack of money. None at all since she’d joined her London-based architects’ firm. She wasn’t estranged from her father – even in her darkest moments Karen couldn’t imagine anything so final – but they had rules. They met now for lunches in neutral places, stiffly edged restaurants in Kensington or Chelsea, where surviving without a spat until the third course classed as a successful visit.