‘I had a brother and sister,’ she says, feeling the fresh shock propelling the words from her mouth too fast, leaving no gaps between them.
Dido glances up at her. ‘Wow,’ she says. ‘What happened to them?’
‘No one knows. The solicitor seems to think they might be dead.’
And there it is. The heaviest of all the extremely heavy facts that have been weighing her down for days. It lands between them, heavy as a thrown hammer.
‘God,’ says Dido. ‘That’s … I mean, how can that be?’
She shrugs. ‘The police came after a call from a neighbour. They found my parents and some other man dead in the kitchen. They’d committed suicide, some kind of pact. And there was me, ten months old, healthy and well in a cot upstairs. But no sign of my brother and sister.’
Dido falls back into her chair, her mouth agape. She says nothing for a moment. ‘OK.’ She sits forward and clamps her temples with the heels of her hands. ‘So, there was a cult. And your parents carried out a suicide pact with some random man …’
Libby nods. ‘They poisoned themselves with plants they’d grown in the garden.’
Dido’s jaw falls again. ‘Yes,’ she says drily. ‘Of course they did. Fuck. Then what?’
‘There’d been other people living in the house. Possibly another family, with children. But when the police got there, there was nobody. Just the dead bodies and me. All the children had just … disappeared. Never been heard of since.’
Dido shivers and puts a hand to her chest. ‘Including your brother and sister?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘They’d barely been seen in years. The neighbours assumed they were away at boarding school. But no school ever came forward to say they’d been a student there. And one of them must have stayed on in the house after my parents died, because apparently someone had been looking after me for days. My nappy was fresh. And when they took me out of the cot, they found this.’ She takes the rabbit’s foot from her bag and passes it to Dido. ‘It was tucked into my blankets.’
‘For luck,’ says Dido.
‘I suppose so,’ Libby replies.
‘And the other guy who died,’ Dido asks, ‘who was he?’
‘Nobody knows. There was no paperwork to identify him, just his initials on the suicide note. No one reported him missing, no one recognised him from police sketches. The theory is that he was an itinerant. A gypsy, maybe. Which would perhaps explain that.’ She gestures at the rabbit’s foot in Dido’s hand.
‘Gypsies.’ Dido massages the word with relish. ‘Gosh.’
‘And the house, it’s weird. It’s dark. And I was there, on Saturday morning, and I heard something. Upstairs.’
‘What sort of something?’
‘Well, a someone. Someone moving. A cough.’
‘And you’re sure it wasn’t the neighbours?’
‘I suppose it could have been. But it really sounded like it was coming from the top of the house. And now I’m too scared to go back there. I feel like I should just put it on the market and get rid of it and move on. But …’
‘Your brother and sister …？’
‘My brother and sister. The truth. My story. It’s all bound up in that house and if I sell it, I may never find out what really happened.’
Dido stares for a moment at the newspaper article. Then she looks up at Libby.
‘Here,’ she says, tapping at the top of the newspaper article with her fingertip. ‘Him. The journalist.’ She squints at the byline. ‘Miller Roe. He’s your man. You need to get in touch with him. Just imagine how amazed he’ll be after all his months of investigative journalism to suddenly find you in his inbox. Serenity Lamb herself. Complete with actual rabbit’s foot.’