PROLOGUE
Sunday, 20 April 1997
The girl is twelve and she is running.
Her feet pound the grass, powered by the twin engines of grief and fear. She does not stop until she reaches the summit of Saltbox Hill.
Below her, the village huddles under the cloak of an impending storm. She bends at the waist, panting and crying, and it is hard to breathe. Across the bruised horizon, she glimpses Hilltop House and her nausea ripens into a darkness she dare not think about.
There are cars, so many cars with blue and white livery and flashing lights, and they snake along the stretch of road between the stuccoed mansion and her own smaller home.
The grown-ups are dead.
The sky trembles with thunder. The girl’s body vibrates with it too. She glances upwards as a lightning arc blanches the clouds. Sporadic drops of rain hit her arms, as if they can’t be bothered, and then harder and faster until she is soaked through.
She starts running again, seeking shelter from the downpour.
An oak tree crowns the hill and it’s there the girl heads, damp seeping into her trainers, deep cuts of sorrow inflaming her heart. In this baptism of rain, she thinks: The sky is grieving too.
The air is sharp with ozone but it is not enough to rid her of the old-penny scent of blood, or the sweet-rot sickliness of the makeshift bedroom downstairs.
The grown-ups are dead.
Her mother.
Mrs Carter.
Dr Carter.
Deader than disco, her father would say, in that deadpan tone of his, and an appalled laugh spills from her.
It is her birthday tomorrow but there will be no celebration. Cards, yes, but of condolence, the first pushed through the letter box at lunchtime. No cake with pink icing, but still-warm lasagnes left on the porch, condensation collecting on their tinfoil lids. She swipes the back of her hand across her eyes and runs harder.
The girl is almost at the tree, spring thickening its leaves, branches spread in welcome. Their faces blink on and off in her memory like the rotating lights of a merry-go-round. Mother. Mrs Carter. Dr Carter. To her twelve-year-old self, their deaths are entwined like brambles, choking everything.
She has told a lie. A big one.
There is no way back from it now.
She pauses to catch her breath, bent in half, hands on knees. Across the valley, two private ambulances pull out of Hilltop House. She watches their slow progress through the village but they are too far away to be anything more than grey smudges on the skyline.
The water sheets off her shoulders, trickles down her neck. Her hair hangs in clumps around her face. She is a handful of footsteps from the tree when the sky lights up again.
The girl lifts her head and watches the shape of lightning against violet clouds. She waits for it to happen again. She is still waiting when a crack opens up above her and a bright bolt strikes the right upper quadrant of her back.
The lightning moves at one-third the speed of light. It haloes her. It scorches the silver necklace at her throat, flashes across her torso, the current scrambling the electrical impulses of her heart. It exits through the soles of her feet, leaving two coin-shaped holes and singe marks on her trainers.
The girl is thrown to the grass, her body smoking, the grumble of thunder in the air.
PART ONE
WHO?
1
Thursday, 13 December 2018
In eleven minutes and fourteen seconds, Catherine Allen, who only wants to be ordinary, will be dead.
She doesn’t know it yet. Her face is pressed into the clean sheet she smoothed across their bed that morning, darkness wrapped around her like an old friend. Mouth slightly open. Deep and even breaths.
The snow began to fall at midnight and hasn’t stopped. Four hours later, it covers the square of their front garden, the roof of their boxy cottage and the street outside. A thickness that suffocates the sounds of the night until it is too late to run.
Even then, she can’t be sure what disturbs her. A minute ago, she was asleep, a reprieve from the turmoil of the last few days. Now here she is, jerked into wakefulness like a fish on a hook, eyes wide in the still of their bedroom, the thunder of adrenalin in her veins.
Honor?
She listens to the blackness, for the cries of her twelve-year-old daughter. Honor’s night terrors, a recent affliction, have been known to wake up the rest of the family, but tonight she is quiet.
The tip of Catherine’s nose is cold. The heating went off hours ago and the air tastes of ice. She pulls the duvet over her head. Immediate warmth. The sound of her heartbeat in her ears.
Intruders?
She strains to hear beneath the quickening of her own breath. Some nights, she is convinced of footsteps tracking across the kitchen floor or the whisper of voices in the hallway, but there is never anyone there.
Edward rolls over, dragging the duvet with him. His snoring fills up all the silent spaces, and she nudges him with her foot. He stops snoring and starts grinding his teeth.
She despises that sound, the grating of enamel against itself. She touches his jaw, trying to hold it still. Edward only grinds his teeth when something is on his mind. He’s been doing it a lot lately.
But she’s hardly seen him this week, and when their lives have collided over a late dinner or half an hour’s television, she hasn’t liked to ask why he’s been keeping her at arm’s length.
She knows it isn’t a woman, at least not in that way; even though the years have deepened his boyish good looks into the kind of crumpled attractiveness that makes the school mothers look twice, Edward’s always had strident views on fidelity. But he is short-tempered and secretive with his phone, shutting down the screen whenever she surprises him, staring at her with an expression she cannot place.
Last Thursday night, he lied to her. I’ve been playing squash, love. With Mark from work. But one of the fathers from football saw him getting off the train from London when he was supposed to be on the court.
On her bedside table, the clock clicks forward another minute. Each tiny hair on her arm rises until her skin is stippled with goosebumps.
4.07 a.m.
Even now, that combination of digits has the power to root her in place.
Twenty-one years ago, in another bedroom and another life, a different clock stopped forever at precisely the same time, a web of hairline cracks across its face.
Catherine never speaks about that night. The past is put away now. It will not define her. She tries her best not to think about it, but every now and then it shoves its way in, ugly and unwelcome. The devil’s clock, her mother called it, those hollow hours before dawn when the darkness is full of horrors and sleep will not come.
Her memories unfold like a macabre chain of paper dolls.
The bodies of her parents. A black pool spreading across the carpet. The moon’s reflection in the handle of the scissor blade buried in her father’s neck. Her mother’s limp hand hanging over the bed, pastel-pink varnish on her nails.
Her older sister, pyjamas soaked with blood, blonde hair like a halo, being led away by police.
How she had loved her then.
Catherine closes her eyes and calls up Honor’s face, all braces and apple-red cheeks. Laughing and dancing, making up songs. Warm hands. Wholesome and happy. A talisman to protect them all.
A car door slams outside.
Edward stirs again. Catherine half rises from their bed. In this pretty village on the anonymous edges of an Essex market town, most inhabitants are asleep by ten o’clock.