Prologue
The chill December wind blows in gusts, turning drizzle to slivers of glass and scoring the sea with angry white slashes. A boat emerges through the dawn mist like a ghostly galleon. The man at the helm is still and rigid. He cuts the engine and the small vessel drifts into dock. He moves to the side of the boat and bends for a coiled rope, which he throws over a bollard with ease. He pulls the rope tight and secures it at the cleat. His movements are sure, his features set in sombre concentration. The man reaches down and takes hold of the boat’s hose and, grim-faced, he washes the deck down. All the surfaces and edges and crevices. He takes great care.
He climbs out of the boat and begins to walk up the jetty. But he stops halfway and his head and shoulders slump forward like a marionette with snapped strings. For a few moments he is motionless, spent, his arms hanging limp at his sides, but then he rallies, straightens his back, forces himself along the gangway past the discarded fishing nets and stacked crates patched with algae and salt stains. Each step is heavy with the air of a condemned man approaching the gallows.
He thinks the port is deserted. He thinks he’s alone with only the waking seagulls and the echo of his laboured footsteps for company. But he’s wrong.
He isn’t alone.
There is somebody watching.
Chapter One
Hannah
In the early days, when memories of that night ambushed me at every opportunity, routine was my lifeline. Routine gave me a set of stepping stones over the quicksand. It got me through my days without thinking. Thinking wasn’t good for me. Thinking was where the madness lay.
These days, fifteen years on, I rely less on routine. I’ve let go of the smaller things. I no longer wear navy on a Monday, for example, or pull my hair – twisted clockwise, using seven pins – into a tight bun on a Thursday. The bigger jobs, the weekly chores, still have their set days, more, I think, because I find it comforting rather than necessary. Today is a Tuesday, so after I’ve walked the dog, I’ll catch the 10.07 bus into Penzance to meet Vicky, spend an hour with her, shop for what I need that day, then catch the 14.13 home, and make our supper. I cook from scratch every day. On a Tuesday I make something with lamb. For ease, I rotate three of Nathan’s favourites: shepherd’s pie, Lancashire hotpot, moussaka.
Today it’s shepherd’s pie.
‘Come on then,’ I say to the dog.
Cass enjoys routine as much as I do and has been waiting at the back door, her eyes bolted to me, since Alex left for school. When I lift her lead from the hook she jumps up and spins excited circles around me. I swear this dog smiles proper smiles. Her face breaks in two, white teeth on show, eyes crinkled with joyful anticipation.
‘Silly dog,’ I whisper, as she bounds out of the back door and along the gravel path which folds around the house. When she gets to the gate she stops and glances back at me, jogging on the spot with impatience.
Cass is a tricoloured collie-cross from the animal rescue in Truro. She has odd eyes, one brown, the other – a wall eye – the colour of glacier ice, the pale blue accentuated by the pirate’s patch of black fur which surrounds it. When we aren’t walking, she spends her time curled up in her basket in the kitchen or stretched out on the front doorstep, paws neatly crossed, watching the world with her dewy mismatched eyes. Nathan took some convincing. I begged for years. A home isn’t a home without a dog, I’d said. Thankfully he was swayed by the ‘a large country house needs a dog’ argument I pushed. I’m not exaggerating when I say that before Cass arrived to keep me company, the never-ending hours spent in this suffocating place were torture. Nathan has never taken to her, but she’s clever and keeps herself inconspicuous when he’s around.
The gate clicks shut behind us and I breathe in deeply, relishing, as I do every day, the immediate sense of freedom. I loathe the house. Disquiet ferments in its shadows and the air inside is heavy as if each molecule is formed from lead. To the outside world Trevose House is impressive, huge and undeniably beautiful, a grand building which passersby take note of. I watch them sometimes, from the window on the first floor landing, concealed from sight behind the musty damask curtains. Walkers on the lane who slow down to take a better look, occasionally stop and lean casually over the wall to point out features and nod with appreciation. Some take photographs on their phone. Perhaps for Instagram. Hashtag housegoals. Sometimes, if I’m outside, hanging the laundry or pinning back raspberry canes, they might catch sight of me and blush, ashamed of their snooping, hastily informing me how lovely my home is as if this will excuse their intrusion. A curt nod and no attempt to engage invariably sends them scurrying away and I become no more than an easily dismissed entry etched into the diary of their day, the dour owner of that beautiful house we walked past.
Trevose House, near New Mill, with iron gates which close with a clang and lock with a large key more at home on the belt of a gaoler. Two stone pillars stand guard either side. The granite walls are studded with a line of sash windows and three wide steps lead up to a grand doorway beside which the date of construction – 1753 – is carved into the seal-grey stone. The house was the principal dwelling on land profitably run by the Cardew family for generations. That was, until Nathan’s father got involved. Charles Cardew was a poker-loving drunk who, between inheriting the estate in his mid-thirties and killing himself at fifty-two, sold most of it off in chunks to pay gambling debts. Three hundred acres or so, four farm workers’ cottages, and a number of characterful barns which, as Nathan often tells me bitterly, could have been converted into lucrative holiday rentals.
Nathan has no fond memories of his father and rarely mentions him with anything other than contempt in his voice. According to my mother, Charles was a drog-polat – a rascal – with a twinkle in his eye. He spent most of his time in the pubs of Penzance and Newlyn, buying drinks for the locals and losing his money to anybody willing to sit down and play cards with him. He shot himself in the face in the study at Trevose House on Nathan’s thirteenth birthday. Nathan and his sister, Kerensa, who was seventeen, found him. It turned out the debts he’d run up were far worse than he’d let on and, after she’d replaced the carpet in the study, it fell to Nathan’s mother to clear up the financial mess he’d left behind. Sylvia Cardew had, in her own words, no time for fools, gluttons, the idle or weak, and slowly but surely she managed to sort out the chaos. Kerensa ran away from home soon after Charles killed himself and – if sotto voce local rumours were to be believed – died from a heroin overdose in a squalid bedsit in Hastings eight months later. Though Nathan doesn’t talk about his sister, there’s a photograph of her in a silver frame on his desk, taken when she was about fifteen or sixteen. She sits in the garden of Trevose, holding a blade of grass, smiling at something, or someone, unseen beyond the camera. Her hair is plaited into a loose braid and she’s dressed in a long flowery skirt and muslin shirt. Bare feet. A silver ring on her middle toe. She wears no make-up and her face is dusted with freckles, her eyes shining with joyful abandon. I think I would have liked her.
Sylvia Cardew didn’t stay in Cornwall. She once told me, lips pursed, nose wrinkled as if smelling something vile, that she’d never got on with the county – too parochial, too backward – but I’m certain it was scandal and snide whispers that drove her away. Whatever the reason, the curtains at Trevose House were drawn and the furniture sheeted, and she and Nathan, aged fifteen, moved to a mews house with neat window boxes in Kensington. When Nathan and I married, she bequeathed him their holiday home as a wedding gift. It was riddled with ghosts she wanted nothing more to do with, so instead gave them to me.