Weyward(6)
The turrets disappear, and then she glimpses something else. Something that makes her heart thud sharply in her chest.
A row of animals – rats, she thinks, or maybe moles – strung up on a fence, tied by their tails. The car rolls on and they slip mercifully from view. Just some harmless Cumbrian custom. She shudders and shakes her head, but she can’t forget the image. The little bodies, twisting in the breeze.
The cottage is slung low to the ground, like an anxious animal. The stone walls are blurred with age, ivy-covered. Ornate letters carved into the lintel spell its name: Weyward. A strange name for a house. The familiar word with the odd spelling, as if it’s been twisted away from itself.
The front door looks done-in, the dark green paint peeling from the bottom in ribbons. The old-fashioned lock is large and cobwebbed. She fumbles for the keys in her handbag. The jangling sound cuts through the morning quiet and something rustles in the shrubbery next to the house, making her jump. Kate hasn’t set foot inside since she was a child – way back, when her father was still alive. Her memories of the cottage – and her great-aunt – are dim, shadowy. Still, she’s surprised by the fear in her gut. It’s just a house, after all. And she’s got nowhere else to go.
She takes a breath, goes inside.
The hallway is narrow and low-ceilinged. A cloud of dust rises from the floor with each step, as if in greeting. The walls are lined with pale green wallpaper, almost hidden by framed sketches of insects and animals. She flinches at a particularly lifelike rendition of a giant hornet. Her great-aunt had been an entomologist. Kate can’t quite see the appeal, herself – she’s not exactly fond of insects, or anything that flies. Not anymore.
She finds, at the back of the house, a threadbare living room, a wall of which comprises the kitchen. Blackened copper pots and twists of dried herbs hang above a range that looks centuries old. The furniture is handsome but weathered: a buckling green sofa, an oak table surrounded by a motley of mismatched chairs. Above a crumbling fireplace, the mantelpiece is littered with strange artefacts: a withered husk of honeycomb; the jewelled wings of a butterfly, preserved in glass. One corner of the ceiling is shrouded in cobwebs so thick they look intentionally cultivated.
She fills the rusted kettle with water and puts it on the hob while she searches through the cupboards for supplies. Behind tinned beans and jars of pale, pickled mysteries, she finds some teabags and an unopened packet of chocolate bourbons. She eats over the sink, looking out of the window to the bottom of the garden, where the beck glints gold in the dawn. The kettle sings. Clutching her mug of tea, she tracks back up the corridor to the bedroom, floorboards creaking underfoot.
The ceiling is even lower here than in the rest of the house: Kate needs to stoop. Through the window she can see the hills that ring the valley, dappled by clouds. The room is crowded with bookcases and furniture. A four-poster bed, piled high with ancient cushions. It occurs to her that this is probably the bed her great-aunt died in. She passed away in her sleep, the solicitor said – found by a local girl the next day. Briefly, she wonders if the bedding has been changed since, considers sleeping on the sagging sofa in the other room. But fatigue pulls at her, and she collapses on top of the covers.
When she wakes, she is confused by the unfamiliar shapes in the room. For a moment, she thinks she is back in the sterile bedroom of their London flat: that any minute Simon will be on top of her, inside her … then she remembers. Her pulse settles. The windows are blue with dusk. She checks the time on the Motorola: 6.33 p.m.
She thinks, with an acid wave of fear, of the iPhone she left behind. He could be looking through it right now … but she’d had no choice. And anyway, he’ll find nothing he hasn’t already seen before.
She isn’t sure when he started monitoring her phone. Perhaps he’s been doing it for years, without her realising. He’d always known the passcode, and she offered it up to him to inspect whenever he asked. But even so, last year, he’d become convinced she was having an affair.
‘You’re meeting someone, aren’t you?’ he’d snarled as he took her from behind, his fingers tight in her hair. ‘At the fucking library.’
At first, she thought he’d hired a private investigator to follow her, but that didn’t make sense. Because then he would know that she wasn’t meeting anyone – she just went to the library to read, to escape into other people’s imaginations. Often, she reread books she’d loved as a child, their familiarity a balm – Grimms’ Fairy Tales, The Chronicles of Narnia, and her favourite, The Secret Garden. Sometimes, she would close her eyes and find herself not in bed with Simon, but among the tangled plants at Misselthwaite Manor, watching roses nod in the breeze.
Perhaps that was what he really had a problem with. That he could control her body, but not her mind.
Then there were other signs – like the row they’d had before Christmas. He knew, somehow, that she’d been looking at flights to Toronto, to see her mother. She realised that he’d installed spyware on her iPhone, something that allowed him to track not only her whereabouts, but her search history, her emails and texts. So when the solicitor called her last August about the cottage – her inheritance – she’d deleted the call log from her history and resolved to somehow get a second phone. A secret phone, that Simon would never know about.
It had taken her weeks to scrounge enough cash – Simon gave her an allowance, but she was only supposed to spend this on make-up and lingerie – to buy the Motorola. Only then had she been able to start planning. She’d had the solicitor deliver the keys to a PO box in Islington. Began hiding her allowance in the lining of her handbag, depositing it weekly into the bank account she’d opened in secret.