The Woman Who Lied(27)
They head back to the children, who are still hovering on the landing. Even Jasmine looks worried and has her arm around Wilfie’s shoulders.
Emilia tries to keep the panic from her voice. ‘It’s okay. It’s sorted now. You both go back to bed.’
Once she’s settled an anxious Wilfie in his top bunk, reassured Jasmine, and closed the skylight on the attic landing, she and Ottilie head down to the kitchen.
‘Your skylights? They’re connected to Alexa too, right?’ says Ottilie, bending down and examining the white Echo on the kitchen shelf above the sink.
‘Yes. Elliot set it all up through the app.’
Ottilie stands back, her hands on her hips, her eyes still on Alexa. ‘Hmm. It sounds to me like it’s been hacked and someone’s instructing your Echo to do these things.’
Of course. Why didn’t she think of that? After all, she wrote it in book four, Who Lies Beneath. The killer in that book was living in the basement of a family’s house and terrorizing them through their digital home assistants.
‘Thank goodness you don’t have a basement,’ says Ottilie, ominously, as though reading her mind.
18
Daisy,
2005
So now here Daisy was, eighteen years old and living with her dad and stepmother, Shannon, in a town far away from where she’d spent her first ten years. Happy, she supposed, although she’d lived nearly half of her life without her lovely mum. She’d tried to find out everything she could about her mother’s murder, but there was surprisingly little information. Her dad had shielded her from all of it, orchestrating a move away from their little seaside town in Devon to Pocklington in Yorkshire.
At first she’d been too young to fully understand what had happened to her mother, but from snatches of hushed conversations, police visits and phone calls, she knew she’d been murdered. And the marking on her ankle, she was sure, had been made by the secret boyfriend. She’d shown her father the newspaper with the doodles in the margin, had told him her suspicions about her mother’s secret boyfriend. Her dad had listened and had taken her observations seriously. He’d even set up an interview with a grave-faced female detective who, it had been obvious, found it hard to know exactly how to talk to ten-year-old girls. She’d heard whispers bandied about between the grown-ups of a ‘cereal killer’, which always made her imagine the murderer eating lots of cornflakes. Finding him had consumed her throughout her teenage years.
‘He’s killed other women,’ her dad admitted one day, when she was about fifteen, and had begged him to tell her more about her mother’s murder. ‘One woman before your mother and several after. The police will catch him eventually.’
It baffled her that this man was getting away with it. Killing in plain sight, and all in Devon. It hadn’t been a coincidence that she’d chosen Exeter University. She knew she had to be around the south-west again – she couldn’t do anything from North Yorkshire.
The day her father had driven her to university he had turned the radio down and said, in his most serious voice, ‘I hope you don’t have any silly ideas about trying to find the man you think killed your mother. You leave anything like that to the police, do you hear, Daise? It’s not safe.’
‘Of course I will,’ she had scoffed in reply. And what could she really do, except on occasion take the bus from the university to her old seaside town on the outskirts of Plymouth to scan the streets, the shops, the arcades, the seafront for any sightings of the Doodle Man. Because she had something the police, and nobody else, had. She had seen him. She had watched her mother sneak him into the house and sneak him out again. She had seen the doodles in the newspapers he’d left behind. And, okay, she hadn’t had a good glimpse of his face, but she’d told the police about his fair sticky-out hair that was caused by his two crowns, his ham-like neck. They’d told her they would try to find out the identity of her mother’s mystery lover, if for no other reason than to eliminate him from their enquiries. But as far as she knew, he had never been found.
And then, during her first term at university, everything changed when she met Ash.
19
Over the next few days, Emilia has no choice but to try to put the recent events to the recesses of her mind. She’s busy preparing for her paperback launch of The Lost Man, and has received the edits on Her Last Chapter. She wants to work on them as quickly as possible so that she can send them to Hannah before her editor goes off on maternity leave. She buries herself in her book, grateful for the distraction, working long hours to get it finished.
Elliot arrives just two hours before they need to leave for her launch. She hasn’t long been home after picking up the kids from school and there is clutter everywhere, last night’s dinner plates still stacked in the sink, the kitchen table covered with Jasmine’s coursework, and half-cut card left over from Wilfie’s English project. She feels a flicker of guilt, then remembers how busy she’s been. Still, she goes about stacking the dishwasher as soon as she hears his key in the lock.
He looks tired but relieved to be home when he walks into the kitchen. He wraps his arms around her waist as she bends over the dishwasher rack and rests his cheek against her shoulder.
‘Can’t tell you how good it is to be home.’