SEVENTY-EIGHT

‘What’s all this then? You going somewhere?’ Josh spoke from just outside the kitchen. He’d seen her bags in the hall stacked neatly beside the front door. When he stepped inside the kitchen Amber avoided looking him in the eye. She prodded the poached eggs with a fork. ‘Just for a few days. Two eggs enough?’

‘Plenty. Smells good.’

She suppressed a tremor in her voice. ‘All local. Bacon and sausage too. Even the bread. There’s coffee in the jug. Just made it.’

‘Cheers.’

In her peripheral vision she watched Josh approach the kitchen bin and drop a grey lump inside. More dust that he didn’t want her to see. He took a stool at the breakfast bar. ‘You’re up early?’

‘I often am.’ She left it at that, but could feel Josh watching her, and she assumed with a familiar expression of mystification at her habits and a concern for her mental health.

‘Thought I’d take off to Cornwall for a few days.’

‘Good. I’m pleased to hear that.’

Amber brought two steaming plates to the table top. ‘Sauces and stuff are all there.’ She nodded at the condiments.

‘Mmm.’ Josh nodded at the plate with approval, his mouth already full. ‘Did you even go to bed?’

‘Too much on my mind.’

‘You’ll drop, kid, if you’re not careful. I’m guessing you never slept the night before either? You OK to drive?’

‘You’d be surprised at what I can endure.’

Josh was taken aback by her retort and tone. He didn’t pursue his curiosity any further as to why she was leaving her house after just one week; a place on which nine months of modifications had just concluded, with a three hundred thousand pound price tag on security and renovations alone.

They ate in silence.

‘Give me a call when you get back here. Just check in,’ he eventually said before draining his coffee cup. ‘I better hit the road. And it’s just as well you’re up to open the gate.’ He dabbed his mouth with a napkin. ‘That was lovely. Thanks for breakfast.’

Just before the front door he paused. ‘I want you to take some more of my infernal advice, Amber. Don’t live here on your own. Take it from someone who made the same mistake. Discussion of full details not possible. But do not live alone with all that up there.’ Josh pointed at the ceiling, towards the study. ‘And with what is up here.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘And I am not talking about getting a cat. Is there a friend who might like a long holiday in Devon?’

A friend: the idea made her laugh unpleasantly. The closest she had to friends were the people she paid to look after her interests: Josh, her barrister, Victoria, her agent, Penelope, her researcher, Peter. Her old friends from Stoke, Bekka, Joanie and Philippa, had all sold stories to papers when the story broke through the news stratosphere and when the world developed a large rubber neck. Her relatively ordinary adolescence, troubled by an insane step-parent and the death of her father, augmented by a few flirtations with soft drugs and a couple of idiotic boyfriends, had been sifted through in as much forensic detail by the tabloids as the black stony soil of 82 Edgehill Road had been analyzed by murder squad detectives on their hands and knees; and all because of her friends.

She’d relegated her ‘friends’ to the part of her personal history she had no inclination to revisit. The fact that not one of her old friends had offered her help when she’d needed a friend most, was something she would never get past. Only Ryan had stepped up.

And look what happened to him.

Amber swallowed the lump in her throat brought on by the memory of her dead ex-boyfriend. The vivid strangeness of his presence in her dreams, and inside her home, produced a quick ripple of panic.

‘Like who?’

Josh shrugged; he could see that he needed to distract her again. ‘Don’t they call them companions, for you ladies of leisure? So get a companion. A maid. No butler because you can’t trust them around the lingerie. A housekeeper. I mean, what with all this bloody dust everywhere, don’t you need someone to keep it clean?’

She started to laugh at the preposterous suggestion. ‘A maid. I’m not sure I even believe in such a thing.’

‘A PA, if it makes you feel better. Find someone who can live in. Light duties. Bit of company. Situation immediately vacant for right candidate. There are agencies for this sort of thing. If you do find someone, I’ll check them out. I’m serious. You do not want to sleep in this house alone. Because you won’t sleep in this house. If you had your way I’d still be here at Christmas in the same clothes.’

‘I’d buy you an entire wardrobe.’

‘You could afford it too. I’ve seen the posters for your film all over the sides of the 38 bus in the West End. But I’m not house trained. Too many bad habits, and I don’t like sitting on my arse all day. Last night is all I will inflict on you.’

Amber felt like a child again, watching her mum walk away from the school gates. Her smile failed as soon as the front gate shuddered closed and Josh’s car disappeared from view. She went back inside the farmhouse, and distracted herself by attending to the dishes and wiping away the cooking oil spattered on the kitchen surfaces. While she worked in the kitchen she left the door connecting the kitchen to the garage open, so she could keep an eye on the car and the room around it, to make sure that all remained in place and as it should be, until she left the house that morning.

During the night, once she’d gathered her wits and pulled herself off the kitchen floor, just after three a.m., she’d showered, dressed and packed. Standing in the wet room and allowing the force of the water to drown out the sound of her crying in case she woke Josh, she’d realized her experience before the mouth of the garage had been similar to a psychotic reaction, or a hallucination produced by powerful drugs; conditions she had read about while researching her book with Peter St John.

But there were no drugs in her life. She constantly questioned her sanity and knew she was teeming with paranoia, insecurity, phobias, aversions, and a persecution complex that medication and therapy might one day successfully soothe, if she chose that route. And maybe her psychological trauma was still so catastrophic she was generating her own ghosts inside the farmhouse. Two psychiatrists had already told her as much, and that she may never fully recover from those nine days at 82 Edgehill Road, and should maintain a programme of structured therapy until a physician deemed it prudent to stop. Advice she had decided against taking once the investigation and the inquest concluded. Maybe that was another unwise decision. For a long time she had longed for a doctor or psychiatrist to categorically tell her that she was mentally ill and had imagined everything.

But she was not going to fool herself that the impossible had not returned to her life. Not now. And her connection to 82 Edgehill Road would no longer be shared with Josh or Peter St John, because neither of them would entertain her ravings.

Maybe the kind of person who claimed a special relationship with the dead – a medium or spiritualist – would engage with her. She’d just spent hours considering the option of inviting such a ‘gifted’ individual to her home, while also worrying that a medium might try and shake her down for a small fortune. Going that route also made her feel she was introducing the inauthentic to an experience she had never embellished with spiritual beliefs or superstition.

But what troubled her most since she had struggled up and off the kitchen tiles in the early hours of the morning were her thoughts of Ryan. If her impressions of the night had been correct, Ryan was not at rest, and nor were any of the victims of number 82. But not even dear Ryan, who had unwittingly sacrificed his life in an attempt to save her, was welcome here.

Ryan had been with her last night, and inside her room, at least in spirit. A presence of Ryan. Or perhaps an illusion of her ex-boyfriend that something had introduced into her home to taunt her and drive her mad. In the middle of the night, as she’d thrown clothes and toiletries into her Samsonite cases, Amber had even considered that Ryan was trying to warn her. And maybe Margaret Tolka had performed this function too, by filling the kitchen with the fragrance of perfume. Revenants that acted as sensory warnings. Beside Bennet, it was possible that was all the dead had ever tried to do at 82 Edgehill Road: warn her.

She had come across such things in her study of hauntings, but she wasn’t convinced; they hadn’t warned her last night, they had guided her downstairs. And now her confounding ignorance of why this had come back into her life had begun to feel terminal.