I Spy

I took a lock of her hair between my fingers, to peel off the purple acrylic gloop that had dried on it. ‘You’ve found some time to paint this morning?’

She was glowing when she nodded yes. ‘At last. I got up early.’ She was so beautiful and cleverly funny that almost every man I ever met would want to go out with her. But she didn’t seem to know this.

‘I’m glad.’ I noticed Zac, pushing through the crowd to get to me.

‘Hi, Holly Dolly.’ Gaston’s voice was so booming that Zac sent a look his way that would vaporise other mortal beings.

‘Hello, Gaston.’ At least nobody could say I only used the name behind his back. Milly had given up on trying to stop me. I’d known since we were four that he would hurt her. Now that he actually had, I wanted to punch him in his rock-hard gut.

‘You know I consider that name a compliment, don’t you?’ He insisted on kissing me on the cheek, nearly choking me with his aftershave. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t love me.’

‘I really don’t.’

Zac had reached me at last, and curled an arm tightly around my waist, pulling me close to his side. The gulls were wheeling above our heads.

‘The parade’s about to start, Holly.’ He aimed us in the direction of the War Memorial, but the crowd had grown so thick we couldn’t get close to Peggy and James. ‘I came here to support you, and you repay me by sneaking off to Milly and her boyfriend.’

‘Ex-boyfriend, now.’

‘I don’t care who he is.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t sneak, I don’t need to pay you, I didn’t mean to upset you, and I can promise you that talking to Gaston is not fun.’

‘Gaston? I hate those Disney names. You’re too intelligent for that.’

The increasing decibel level as the marching band approached saved me from the need to say more, because the outdoor part of the ceremony was finally underway, and the buglers were sounding.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old …

My voice joined with the others, and I could feel Zac’s irritation melting away. He encased both of my hands inside his, and kept them that way through the two-minute silence.

As we walked from the outdoor memorial to the church that towered over it, he whispered, ‘I’m sorry, Holly. I feel left out, sometimes, of your life here. You’re such a part of things.’

‘You are too.’

‘Am I?’

‘Of course. It matters to me that you want to live here. I know you’re doing it for me. I’m moved by that.’

We processed into the packed church together, and slipped into a pew at the rear. The pillars were garlanded in ribbons that had been strung with poppies. Zac did not bow his head for prayers or recite the Act of Penitence or sing any of the hymns, and certainly not ‘God Save the Queen’.

After the service, he held my hand as we joined the parade, following the band and swinging our arms back and forth to ‘The British Grenadiers’. Zac sang along, and I loved that he knew every word. We were at the tail end, and when I finally glimpsed Milly and Peggy and James again, they were getting further and further ahead as we processed through the town.

I tugged at Zac’s arm, smiling. ‘Shall we catch them up?’

It was as if I had flicked a switch, turning him from happy to sad. ‘Don’t you want to be with me?’

‘Forever.’

‘The three of them are a family. It’s the two of us now.’ He smiled. ‘Or three. Yes?’ He put a hand on my tummy. ‘We’re making our own family. Aren’t we?’

‘Yes.’ I smiled up at him. When I broke his gaze, I realised that I had lost sight of my best friend and my surrogate parents. As far long as I could remember, I had walked with them, and until the last few years, with my grandmother too, claiming James’s arm during the Remembrance Sunday commemorations that St Ives did so beautifully.

‘Doesn’t that make you happy?’

‘Yes.’ I nodded to confirm it. ‘That’s a lovely thing. Yes.’ It was what I had always wanted. And I could see he was right about my not being a part of the family of three that was Peggy and James and Milly. But to be without them in that place, on that day, was like having a piece of myself cut away.

Now The Backwards House

Two years and five months later

Bath, Tuesday, 2 April 2019

The country lane that Maxine’s driver is speeding along is lined with golden daffodils. They flutter and dance and twinkle on their green banks in exactly the way Wordsworth said.

I have the sense that Maxine is watching me, though she is slumped against the cream-coloured leather car seat and seeming to look at her own lap, where her hands are resting. Her nails, as usual, are long and perfectly manicured. The polish is what my grandmother calls dragon-lady red, and matches Maxine’s lipstick. I have never seen a chip in that polish.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Not far.’ She answers like a parent. Or at least how I think parents answer, because my own have been dead for too long for me to know this from experience, and I am not a parent myself, however much I try to tell myself that she counted and I am.

The car enters a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Bath. Because the houses here are built on top of old quarries, they get alarming cracks from subsidence, so walls split and ceilings buckle, hurling dark-grey plaster dust and chunks of building into the rooms.

Maxine’s driver turns onto a street that is filled with police cars and vans, all clustered near a modern, brick, perfectly square end-of-terrace house. The house is surrounded by police tape. ‘Come on,’ Maxine says, and I follow her out of the car.

I stand a couple metres away as Maxine speaks to a tall man with dark hair and dark-rimmed glasses, wearing a dark suit and standing outside of the cordon. He looks like the prince of death as he peers at me. I decide he is more likely to be MI5 than police as he nods at Maxine and says, ‘Tess’s up there. She’s expecting you.’

Maxine moves her head to signal that we need to go into the tent that encloses the house’s front door. The door has an awning with a strange coating of artificial grass. We are given forensic suits, so that our hair is obscured by white hoods, our mouths and noses covered by white masks, and our shoes enveloped in white footwear protectors. I want to hesitate, but I don’t let myself. Maxine marches into the house, and I march after her.

‘Don’t touch or move anything,’ she tells me, without turning round.

The carpet inside the entryway is mink-grey and I can see the tracks left by the vacuum, despite the ghost-shapes of old spills that no amount of shampoo will remove. The air is scented with pine and lemon, and window cleaner, plus the lingering hint of something that makes my stomach clench because it reminds me of Zac’s soap.

‘The burglar alarm wasn’t tripped,’ Maxine says. ‘She either de-activated it to let someone in, or didn’t activate it in the first place. Good chance she knew them.’

‘She. Who is she?’

Maxine is making a performance of looking around too attentively to notice that I have spoken.

The house seems the wrong way round, with the sitting room at the back, spanning the building’s entire width. There are no books on the shelves of the fake wood bookcases, and no dust either. There is a single half-drunk cup of strong black tea on the cheap glass coffee table. Not many people drink their tea with no milk. I’ve known two, and though Milly likes hers weak, and Zac strong, it came as a surprise that she and Zac should share anything other than their mutual hatred.

The kitchen is to the left side of the entry hall. It is also pristinely clean, though far from luxurious with peeling laminate cupboards, a half-size fridge like my own, and cork flooring.

At the bottom of the stairs is a handbag, stiff and upright, the obvious item in any game of odd one out. Tan leather, shiny gold hardware, and the Hermès logo in its cleanly embossed capital letters. Only once before have I come across a designer bag of this ilk.

Maxine answers one of the many questions I haven’t voiced. ‘It was a two-month holiday let, paid by credit card. They haven’t traced the holder of the card, but it didn’t belong to the woman who was occupying the house. She moved in a week ago – used a false name.’

We crunch our way up the stairs, along a roll of white paper. I can see on either side of it that the stairs have been sanded and painted.

At the top of the landing, straight in front of us, is an open bedroom door. A tall woman in another moon suit, glasses peeping out of her otherwise-covered face, emerges and squeezes onto the landing with us. ‘Hey, Maxine,’ the woman says.

‘Hey, Tess.’ It isn’t the forensic drama that brings home the fact that I am being allowed to see another version of Maxine, who is not slouching. It is Maxine’s use of the word ‘Hey’ and its attendant chumminess.

‘Needless to say,’ says Tess, ‘don’t touch anything.’

‘Sure thing,’ Maxine says, in more of the new Maxine language.

Tess does not ask who I am when she motions for us to follow her. There is a frizz of grey hair on her temple, which has escaped the head covering. There are smile lines around her eyes, and my guess is that in the part of her life that doesn’t involve space suits and corpses, this woman is restrainedly contented, with wry good humour.

Instead of moving forward when Tess beckons, though, I freeze. My head is telling me to go in, but my body does not seem to want to.

I’d thought the sweat had dried on me in Maxine’s car after my run, but I am wet again, beneath my breasts, down my spine. The mask over my mouth is stopping me from breathing. My scalp is itchy and hot beneath the hood.

Maxine puts a hand on my shoulder. The last time she did that I practically chopped it off. She says, ‘You don’t know the strength of a person until they’ve been tested.’

I nearly say, No shit, Sherlock, which is one of Milly’s favourite expressions. Milly loves the word shit. Instead, I manage a more restrained, ‘Thanks for your wisdom,’ and for the first time in forever, Maxine visibly blanches.

Then The Forgotten Things

Two years and four months earlier

Cornwall, Mid-December 2016

Zac left for London early this morning for a British Cardiovascular Society symposium. Tomorrow he will fly to the Ukraine for a fleeting visit, to do some teaching in a hospital in Kiev. Before he drove away, I leaned into the open car window for a final kiss goodbye, my hair unbrushed and circles under my eyes after a night of endlessly being sick.

I watched the car disappear out of sight, fantasising that I would get out my journal and write. Instead, I wandered through the house nibbling a special ginger biscuit that was supposed to help with nausea but was proving useless. I was ten weeks pregnant but the sickness wasn’t getting any better.

Zac hated clutter, but this place was decorated in a romantic style that seemed to invite it. The personal things were all mine – the cardigan thrown over the cabbage roses sofa, the pregnancy magazines covering the distressed coffee table, the pot of lip gloss and ponytail holder on the white-painted chimney piece, the novels on the chintz armchair. Zac was constantly putting them away, then scrubbing the artificially aged surfaces with disinfectant wipes. I was trying to be more orderly, because it was painful to see him so unnerved by what he would call mess and I would call the ordinary chaos of human life.

Since Maxine’s ambush on the cliffs two months earlier, I’d stepped up my efforts to search the house for some sign of Jane. I poked my fingers into the toes of Zac’s socks when I tossed the clean pairs into the drawer. I ran my hand under the mattress when I made the bed. I examined the seams of his suits when I hung up his shirts from the dry cleaners. I checked his books as I dusted, to see if any were mere shells with cavities for hiding things. So far, I had found nothing. His taste in books, all hardbacks and dust-free, was unsurprising – medical ethics, law, artificial intelligence, and the surveillance state. He especially liked it when these subjects intersected. His current book at bedtime was about the use of technology by a group of anonymous hackers to promote political and social change.

As I closed the lid of a shoebox that lived in his wardrobe – it contained a pair of unworn black Oxfords – I had a flash of Zac loading a new carbon-fibre suitcase onto the passenger seat of his sports car. Everybody saved their old suitcases for packing stuff when they moved, didn’t they? Before I had finished this thought I was rushing down the stairs to the cupboard that runs beneath them.

My own suitcases were towards the front. I’d used them to transport my stuff from what I referred to as the brown house. My attic bedroom, with walls that I’d painted all the colours of the rainbow, was the one exception to the law of brown. The rest of the house was filled with brown carpets that my grandmother vacuumed every day, brown tapestry curtains that I was always opening and she was always closing, and brown sofas covered in bobbled brown blankets that I was always tearing off and she was always putting back. ‘I don’t want my fine furniture destroyed by the sun,’ my grandmother would say.

I actually felt a kind of nostalgic affection for the brown house as I started to drag my suitcases from the cupboard beneath Zac’s stairs, sliding and pulling them into the wide hallway behind me.

I couldn’t help but smile at my grandmother’s blue vinyl train case, which was like seeing an old friend. When I once expressed surprise at the pretty colour, she told me my grandfather bought it for her. ‘Horribly impractical. See how it scuffs,’ she said. But she looked at it with reluctant affection. After all, she’d brought it from their farm to my parents’ house when she moved in to look after me. I in turn brought it to Zac’s, stuffed with my bathroom things and make-up.

It wouldn’t occur to Zac that I’d enter this dank and dusty place, which he avoided, given the germs that must infest it. I had to crawl inside to reach the final suitcases. They were old, made of tan canvas and trimmed with tan fake leather in the corners. The larger of the two was too bulky and heavy to comply with today’s airline specifications.

I shone my phone torch over them. Flimsy padlocks linked the zippers. I lifted each of the identification tags. Zac had written his name on both. He’d probably dragged them around the continent during his gap year grand tour, and kept them out of nostalgic fondness.

I tugged Zac’s clunky things into the hall, then unfastened my grandmother’s train case. Tucked within a silky stretch pocket on its topside was a snap-closing coin purse filled with tiny keys for old suitcase locks. The purse – quilted fabric, and brown, of course – had lived in that pocket for as long as I could remember. I could hear my grandmother’s voice. Brown is a practical colour, Holly. It doesn’t show the dirt. Hurrah for brown. For once, I was glad of my grandmother’s fixed habits. In an instant, I spilled the keys onto the stripped floorboards with a clatter.

The good thing about suitcase keys, my grandmother used to say, was that so many of them worked in multiple locks – you just needed to gauge the size by eye. Perhaps my grandmother had a bit of spy in her, too. The third key I tried fitted perfectly into the lock on Zac’s larger case. There was a satisfying click and the shackle popped out.

I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find inside when I unzipped it, kneeling on the cold floor. Secret documents? Stacks of cash? Jane’s body? My expectations were unreasonably high, so my stomach fell when the lid of the case flopped onto the floor with a puff of dust and I saw that it was empty.

The same key worked on the lock of the medium-sized suitcase, too. ‘Oh,’ I said out loud. Because there was no way that the suitcase nested inside belonged to Zac.

Despite my grandmother-shaped aversion to brown, the hidden case was quite charming. The diagonal lines of four-petalled flowers and interlocking Ls and Vs processed in their determined order, stamped in muted gold on a brown background. One of my hands floated towards the monogrammed canvas and slid extra-lightly across the PVC coating, surprised by how smooth it was. But I quickly got down to the business of unbuckling the leather tag to check whether there was a name on it.

JM was hot-stamped on the surface. It had to stand for Jane Miller. Had to. To my delight, there was a piece of thick cream paper inside the tag, though there was no writing on the front. I took it out and flipped it. On the reverse, in Zac’s perfectly regular cursive, it read Jacinda Molinero. There was no address or telephone number or email. Just the name. Hardly of any use if the suitcase were to be lost.

My language skills had languished since that final MI5 interview. Practising them hurt like an imperfectly healed wound when you picked off the scab. But there was something about the word Molinero … I needed to remember what it meant.

I closed my eyes to try to think. What came to me was the illustrated deck of cards from when I first started to learn Spanish. The teacher thought the cards would help us with the words for different occupations. It was a kind of un-cosy version of Happy Families, where the dentists and plumbers and shopkeepers all looked tired and overworked. There was a particular card I was fumbling for, in whatever dark corner of my brain it was filed in.

I squeezed my eyes shut more tightly, and the picture began to form. An old lady scowling in her blue apron and white hat, letting flour fall from her fingers into a huge yellow sack. Behind her was a red-roofed wooden house with a windmill attached to it. Señora Molinero. That was what it said beneath her. Mrs Miller.

Molinero was Spanish for Miller. Jane Miller. Jacinda Molinero. The first names started with the same letter. Jacinda had to be Jane. Zac’s handwriting on the suitcase label seemed to confirm this.

If you come across any objects of Jane’s, tell us about them in as much detail as you can. That was what Maxine said to me on the bench by the cliffs. But it wasn’t Maxine I wanted this knowledge for. It was me. Me, myself and I, as my grandmother used to say, never clear as to whether she thought this emphasis on self was a good or bad thing. I grabbed my phone and typed in the name Jacinda Molinero, but the search engine returned only blanks.

Thankfully, if Jacinda Molinero’s uber-designer bag ever had a lock, it was missing. The brass zipper moved with satisfying smoothness, and I laid the two halves of the bag carefully on the floor. Each half was covered by a mesh divider, so I unzipped those too. There was nothing beneath them.

One of the dividers had a small zipped pocket built into it, so I undid this and slipped a hand inside. My fingers bumped against something stiff and square, and came up clutching a black card with silver lettering and a foil edge. Albert E. Mathieson, International Tax Law.

I tried another Internet search, this time for Albert E. Mathieson. There were pages of hits, including a link to his business website, multiple articles in professional tax journals, and blog posts that I could see were genuinely informative as well as extremely scary, because they seemed to suggest that it was very easy to be a criminal tax evader and not even know it. He specialised in high-net-worth clients who were in trouble with America’s Internal Revenue Service, and though his office was in Malibu he represented clients in more than fifty countries.

‘Going somewhere, Holly?’

I screamed, and fell backwards, sitting hard on the floorboards, my stomach plunging even faster than the rest of me.

‘Oh my God. I think I had a heart attack.’

‘Lucky I’m here then.’ Zac held out a hand. I reached for it and he pulled me up. He plucked something from my hair. ‘Cobweb.’ He brushed my cheek with a finger, frowned and wet it in his mouth, then tried again. ‘Dust smear.’ He took a miniature bottle of sanitising gel from a pocket and rubbed some on his hands.

‘Don’t ever sneak up on me like that again.’

‘I didn’t sneak, Holly. You were clearly absorbed.’ His voice, as usual, was ironic and light, but his face was pale, his dual-coloured eye extra bright against his skin.

‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’

He shook his head to deny this absurdity. ‘What are you doing?’

I tried to swallow as I thought, but it was difficult. I surprised myself by telling the truth, which was sometimes easier than a lie. ‘I – I wanted to know about you. See your things. See your history, who you were. Are.’

He laughed. ‘Clearly someone whose taste in suitcases has improved.’

‘Why are you here, Zac? You should be on your way to London.’

‘Why are you here, Holly? You should be on your way to the hospital.’ There was a tension in his lips, as if he was trying not to let them move. But there were still occasional twitches.

‘I called in sick. The morning sickness is so bad. I hardly slept last night.’

‘My poor Holly. I had to come back because I forgot my phone. I’ll still make it – my talk isn’t until late this afternoon.’ He smiled slowly. ‘So we’re both here when we should be somewhere else.’

One of my hands rose to his caress his head, which was damp. ‘Is it raining?’

‘No.’

My heart was still beating fast, but he was sweating. I was struck by how controlled he kept everything in the house, as if in contrast to a body he couldn’t perfectly regulate, though he mostly managed to. ‘Are you angry at me?’ I asked.

‘Why would I be?’ He pulled me into his arms.

‘For looking in your suitcases.’ My forehead was against his chest. He smelled soapy and clean and woody and lovely, when the smell of everything else for the past two months had made me want to be sick.

‘Were you telling me the truth about what you’re doing, Holly?’

I pulled away and looked up at him. He was studying me so intently. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, if you wanted to see my history, as you say, you could have asked. So I can’t help but wonder if you were dragging out those suitcases so you could pack them and run away.’

‘No. Of course not.’ I was shaking my head at the irony of my telling the truth but not being believed. ‘How could you think that?’

‘It’s happened before.’ I could feel him playing with my hair again. ‘Dead fly.’

I shuddered. ‘Have you got it?’

‘Yes.’ He walked quickly to the front door to flick it away, then applied more gel to his fingers. ‘This is your house too. You can go anywhere you wish. Touch anything you find. Open whatever cupboard or drawer you want. I’d never stop you.’

‘Really?’

He took a step away, still with a hand on each of my upper arms, as if needing to evaluate me from different vantage points to make his assessment. ‘Really. I have no secrets from you.’ He leaned over to lift something from the floor. The tax attorney’s card, which I must have dropped when Zac walked in. ‘So you found my good friend Al.’

I cleared my throat, feeling caught out again. ‘Yes. Who is he?’

‘American. We were at UCL together – he read international law. Obsessed with tax but an interesting, funny guy. As smart as they come.’ He glanced towards the beautiful suitcase. ‘Was Al’s card in that?’

‘Yes. Did you give the card to Jane?’

‘Could have been Al – he visited us in London once, several years ago. Might have been me – hard to remember. Anything else you want to know before I leave?’

‘Was the suitcase Jane’s?’

‘Yes.’

‘A gift from you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why do you still have it?’

‘I didn’t know I did. She didn’t leave anything behind when she went. Was her suitcase inside one of mine?’

I nodded, then confirmed it with a quiet, ‘That one,’ as I pointed to his medium-sized suitcase.