She spins round. Behind is dense foliage, bounded by an old brick wall. She pushes an obvious path through it, her feet finding the bare patches in the weeds. The growth is laced with old spider webs which catch on her clothes and in her hair. But she keeps moving. She can feel this course, it’s already in her, she knows what she’s looking for. And there it is, a battered wooden gate, painted dark green, hanging off its hinges, and leading into the overgrown back end of the garden of the house behind.
Miller and Dido stand behind her, peering across her shoulder through the wooden gate. She pushes the gate as hard as she can and peers into the neighbour’s garden.
It’s scruffy and unmanicured. There’s a wonky sundial in the middle of the lawn, and some dusty gravelled paths. There’s no furniture, no children’s toys. And there, down the side of the house, a pathway that seems, from here, to lead directly to the street.
‘I’ve got it,’ she says, touching the padlock that has been snapped open with bolt cutters. ‘Look. Whoever it is that’s been sleeping in the house has been getting in through this gate, across the garden, up on to that concrete thing over there’ – she leads them back into the garden – ‘up on to the garden wall, up the drainpipe on to that platform, see, up there, then up there on to the ledge, and then on to the roof and to the ladder. We just need to work out where that ladder goes.’
She looks at Miller. He looks back at her. ‘I’m not very agile,’ he says.
She looks at Dido, who puffs out her cheeks and says, ‘Oh, come on.’
They head back into the house and back up to the attic rooms. And there it is, a small wooden trapdoor in the ceiling in the hallway. Miller puts Libby on his shoulders and she pushes at it.
‘What can you see?’
‘A dusty tunnel. And another door. Push me up higher.’
Miller grunts and gives her another boost. She clings on to a wooden slat and pulls herself up. The heat is intense up here, and she can feel her clothes sticking to her body with sweat. She crawls along the tunnel and pushes the next wooden trapdoor and is immediately hit by full, glorious sunshine. She’s on a flat roof, where there are some dead plants in pots and two plastic chairs.
She puts her hands on her hips and surveys the view from up here: in front is the sun-baked greenery of Embankment Gardens, beyond that the dark belt of the river. Behind her she can see the grid of narrow streets that stretches between here and the King’s Road; a beer garden filled with drinkers, a patchwork of back gardens and parked cars.
‘What can you see?’ she hears Dido bellow from below.
‘I can see everything,’ she says, ‘absolutely everything.’
25
Marco looks at Lucy through narrowed eyes. ‘Why can’t we come?’ he says. ‘I don’t understand.’
Lucy sighs, adjusts her eyeliner in the small hand mirror she’s using and says, ‘Just because, OK? He’s done me a huge favour and he’s asked me to come alone and so I’m going alone.’
‘But what if he hurts you?’
Lucy stops herself flinching. ‘He’s not going to hurt me, OK? We had a very twisted marriage but we’re not in that marriage any more. Things move on. People change.’
She can’t look at her son while she lies to him. He would see the fear in her eyes. He would know what she was about to do. And he would have no idea why she was about to do it because he had no idea about her childhood, about what she’d run away from twenty-four years ago.
‘You need a code,’ says Marco authoritatively. ‘I’ll call you and if you’re scared you just say, How’s Fitz? OK?’
She nods and smiles. ‘OK,’ she says. She pulls him to her and kisses him behind his ear. He lets her.